# Interesting Decisions vs Wish Fulfillment (from Pulsipher)



## Emerikol (Jul 22, 2014)

Edit:  here is the link --     http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2014/06/game-design-interesting-decisions.html


I thought this phrase deserved a topic of it's own.  Most of the problems people raise on these boards are hypothetical with regards to my own games.  I just don't have those problems.   Over the years though, a few times, I've ran into players who seem to me to be seeking wish fulfillment and are not really that excited about interesting decisions.

So let me define how I am interpreting the terms.

Interesting Decisions 
1.  Campaign choices including interactions with significant NPCs.  The idea of seeking goals outside the dungeon.
2.  Tactical choices while inside combat.  The proper use of various abilities and powers.
3.  Strategic choices.  Picking when and where you want to fight your battles.  Setting up an enemy prior to battle.  Laying traps.  
4.  Puzzles & Traps.  Players actively trying to solve mysteries and puzzles.  Keeping notes about history and legends found in the dungeon.
5.  Resource management.  Thinking about the usage of scarce resources.  The proper planning and packing for an adventure.

Wish Fulfillment
1.  The pleasure of seeing your enemies destroyed in spectacular fashion.
2.  Being viewed by the inhabitants of the setting as a great hero.  Given respect.
3.  Choices driven more by flavor and effect rather than tactical or strategic importance.
4.  Handwaving stuff that is often kept off camera in a high cinematic movie.


I'm far more concerned in my own game with the former than with the latter.  My players always start out as nobodies in the grand scheme of things.  Even at 20th level, they've just entered the ranks of the first order, they are not the sole dominant force in the setting.  It's kind of like the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk.  Even if you are a 20th level character, there is still Tensor, Mordenkainen, Elminster, and so forth.  

My players do draw satisfaction as they advance up which is part of the wish fulfillment idea so it's not 100% mutually exclusive.  They get there though by a very hard road.  They are tested as players to the limits of their imagination and resourcefulness.  So my game tends to be very hard.  Most of my players think other games are easier.  I'm not a killer DM though.  I'm just hard and my players are able to meet the challenge.  For me that is part of the fun of the game.  It is for many players too.   

Those players I mentioned above though do not want the "stress" of fighting for their lives even in game.  They don't mind combat but they really just want to demonstrate their prowess and use their powers and look cool.  It's a different ethic I think and I've mostly over time avoided those players because I don't think I'm giving them what they want.

Thoughts and discussion?




P.S.  Hard in my book does not equate to unfair or inconsistent for the record.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 22, 2014)

Why can't you have both? Why can't the former lead, at least some of the time, to the latter?

It seems completely fake and silly to pretend there's a real "versus" in there. It's a blatant false dichotomy, to me, at least. I can see an individual group trending one what or other more, but that's because there's only a limited amount that can happen in any given setting. Certainly I know that my game definitely offers both.

I'm not sure what the "sole dominant factor" stuff is about. That doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything.

EDIT - I will be very honest and say that I straight up don't believe you when you claim that your game is "very hard". _Every_ time I've seen a RPG campaign where the DM or writer claimed that, it wasn't actually true, because RPGs are RPGs, not pure games. All the ones I've seen fell into:

A) Unfair/Killer DM-style stuff (like Tomb of Horrors - not actually "hard", merely very lethal, which is quite different).

or

B) Fiddly/complicated/tedious/lengthy/demanding of note-taking, but not actually challenging.

or rarely

C) Fair but highly lethal play which borders on the "Killer DM" realm, but doesn't involve as many "GOTCHAS!" (though it probably will involve some). It's not actually hard though.

RPGs in general just are not something that is easy/hard, and approaching them as if they are tends not to be fruitful, IME.

I also don't really buy that there are players who totally don't want to be challenged. I do buy that were are groups where the players don't like to see TPKs frequently and are disinterested in scenarios where their PCs have a high chance of dying, but that doesn't align with hard/easy. You can have something that's very simple and straightforward, and even fair, and yet ultra-lethal and thus no fun to them, or you can have something where the chances of death of PCs is absolute zero, but the chances of failure at what they are doing is extremely high unless they play it very smart (trying to thwart someone who probably can't kill them, but does want to achieve something that they oppose, for example).


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## Emerikol (Jul 22, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Why can't you have both? Why can't the former lead, at least some of the time, to the latter?
> 
> It seems completely fake and silly to pretend there's a real "versus" in there. It's a blatant false dichotomy, to me, at least. I can see an individual group trending one what or other more, but that's because there's only a limited amount that can happen in any given setting. Certainly I know that my game definitely offers both.
> 
> I'm not sure what the "sole dominant factor" stuff is about. That doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything.




Most of these versus are not either or but rather emphasis.  I'm certain as I said above that my players enjoy some wish fulfillment.  I do see though a potential for conflict.  There are people who do not want to struggle mightily but instead mostly want to appear heroic in a grand style without that much effort.   So in those cases, forcing interesting decisions on those people blocks them from their wish fulfillment.

Let's be clear here we are talking about wish fulfillment in terms of character concept.  If you wish your game had interesting choices and you get interesting choices that is a form of wish fulfillment but not the one I'm talking about here.   The terms as in most cases are imperfect.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 22, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> Most of these versus are not either or but rather emphasis.  I'm certain as I said above that my players enjoy some wish fulfillment.  I do see though a potential for conflict.  There are people who do not want to struggle mightily but instead mostly want to appear heroic in a grand style without that much effort.   *So in those cases, forcing interesting decisions on those people blocks them from their wish fulfillment.*
> 
> Let's be clear here we are talking about wish fulfillment in terms of character concept.  If you wish your game had interesting choices and you get interesting choices that is a form of wish fulfillment but not the one I'm talking about here.   The terms as in most cases are imperfect.




I instinctively don't buy it. I mean, I know about half my group loooooves to appear heroic, but if there wasn't any effort involved, they're not particularly excited by it. The other half particularly love tricky decisions and particularly in-combat tactics, but also enjoy being heroic.

Together they loooooove a challenge that INTEREST them, they don't necessarily enjoy a challenge that BORES THEM TO DEATH. Examples, for my main D&D group:

1) A detailed and fiddly word-puzzle where they have to wander a dungeon, get words together to work out clues and finally solve some sort of wordy nonsense.

One of the players will love this. The rest will be asleep and drooling on their character sheets (at best). The difficulty isn't the problem. They're all high-paid problem-solving professionals who deal with far harder mental challenges on a daily basis. The boring-ass nature of the challenge is most assuredly a problem.

2) How are we going to rob this highly-secure magical vault in this bank in the centre of town (for good and justice!  )?

They will all love this. Doesn't matter is it's really tricky to work out how to do it. Doesn't matter if even I can barely come up with a solution. They will engage with it and love it.

Similarly with fights. An easy, boring fight, in which they get to demonstrate how awesome they are (like most 2E fights, in my experience). Yawns all round. A hard, complicated but extremely interesting fight, they'll love it. A tedious, technically-hard wear-down fight that doesn't really challenge them but their dice and their mental endurance? Nope.

You see what I'm saying here? I don't think that it's really easy/hard that's the issue, it's interesting/boring. I think you've confused boring and challenging.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 22, 2014)

I think it's also relevant that wish fulfillment is relatively easy, but interesting choices can be hard for the DM to create.  Especially if you're writing an adventure for publication as opposed to your own players.

And then, of course, there's the DMs who do neither.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 22, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> And then, of course, there's the DMs who do neither.




Oh god they do exist, don't they?

Usually it's because they're doing wish-fulfillment for themselves, in my experience.

As for easy, I think the problem is that whilst wish-fulfillment is easy, if you just keep doing it, without anything to leaven it, the game is likely to get very boring very quickly! Interesting choices can indeed be hard, especially as players often entirely subvert the choice you've set up. I tend to try to set up an interesting, complex, fluid situation and let it roll (D&D is definitely NOT the best game for this, in any edition, but it's manageable in 2E and 4E and probably 5E - in 3E it's doable but require so much prep that it breaks my soul).


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## TerraDave (Jul 22, 2014)

There is also the variant of the DM who is looking for wish fulfillment and not so interested interesting choices... (edit, just ninjaed)

Most players probably bring some of each to the table. I can even think of one who brought a lot of each...but yes, sometimes there is a tension when a player just sort of wants or asserts something, and doesn't really get that it has to come sort of naturally in game. I do see that this perspective highlights something I have dealt with as a DM over the years.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 22, 2014)

Sounds like a re-hash of CaW vs CaS.  Which is to say, nothing more than broadly implying that anyone who doesn't play in the OneTrueWay is a spoiled child.


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## Olgar Shiverstone (Jul 22, 2014)

I'm all about bringing on wish fulfillment as a _result_ of interesting choices.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 22, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Sounds like a re-hash of CaW vs CaS.  Which is to say, nothing more than broadly implying that anyone who doesn't play in the OneTrueWay is a spoiled child.




Seriously?  You couldn't think of a way to phrase that without trying to start a heated argument?

And I don't think it sounds like a re-hash of CaW vs CaS at all.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 22, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Seriously?  You couldn't think of a way to phrase that without trying to start a heated argument?



 I didn't choose to phrase it as "interesting choices" vs "wish fulfillment."  The OP did that.



> And I don't think it sounds like a re-hash of CaW vs CaS at all.



 The crux of CaW/CaS was that CaW players wanted to use sophisticated strategy & tactics to overcome great threats, while CaS players just wanted a 'fair' fight where they could display their character's coolness, secure in the knowledge they aren't at any real risk.  Looks pretty similar, to me, both in content - and, more importantly, in elitist attitude.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 22, 2014)

I feel that you are reading emotional context into both the OP argument and the CaW/CaS that is subjective.  In neither case is the poster trying to laud one and condemn the other, even if he does have a personal preference.

These threads work much better when emotional, condemnatory or accusatory language is avoided.


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## Iosue (Jul 22, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> The crux of CaW/CaS was that CaW players wanted to use sophisticated strategy & tactics to overcome great threats, while CaS players just wanted a 'fair' fight where they could display their character's coolness, secure in the knowledge they aren't at any real risk.  Looks pretty similar, to me, both in content - and, more importantly, in elitist attitude.




Oh wow.  I don't find that an accurate representation of CaW/CaS, and I think it is massively unfair to Daztur.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 22, 2014)

I don't make any representations as to the attitudes of any individual.  But, the ideas outlined in the original post of this thread, and in CaW/CaS, do reek of elitism (whether that was the authors' intents or not) and do each present an us/them dichotomy that is neither constructive, nor fair to anyone shoved onto the non-elite side of the arbitrary lines they draw.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 22, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I don't make any representations as to the attitudes of any individual.  But, the ideas outlined in the original post of this thread, and in CaW/CaS, do evince a hearty dose of elitism and an us/them attitude that is neither constructive, nor fair to anyone shoved onto the non-elite side of the arbitrary lines they draw.




I'm sorry you feel that way.  I think in both cases the writer was intending to be fair to both sides, even though a preference for one side can be intuited - and that it is words like "elitism", "us/them", "shoved" and "arbitrary" that are neither constructive nor fair.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 22, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I'm sorry you feel that way.  I think in both cases the writer was intending to be fair to both sides



So am I:   The most charitable thing I can do is accept that your supposition is correct - and conclude that, in both cases, the attempt failed completely.

I would urge both authors to re-visit their ideas with an eye towards the connotations of the terms they choose, the impression they give of their attitudes towards those they label with those terms - and also with some consideration given to the possibility that there are, in fact, more than two kinds of gamers out there.


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## Iosue (Jul 23, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> So am I:   The most charitable thing I can do is accept that your supposition is correct - and conclude that, in both cases, the attempt failed completely.




Here is the original CaS/CaW post by Daztur.  It is entirely respectful and fair to both sides.  His examples of play are entirely edition agnostic.  His media examples both show positive, well-loved scenes. The initial response is very positive, with many 4e players approving of the post.  Your own initial post in the thread has zero issues with the concept, concerned merely with whether a game can provide both experiences.

In discussion since then, some people may have used it as a stick to beat a dog, but none of _that_ is in Daztur's initial post, and can hardly be called "the crux" of the concept.



> I would urge both authors to re-visit their ideas with an eye towards the connotations of the terms they choose, the impression they give of their attitudes towards those they label with those terms - and also with some consideration given to the possibility that there are, in fact, more than two kinds of gamers out there.




And that is incredibly condescending.  Both Emerikol and Daztur are entirely aware there are more than two kinds of gamers.  The comparisons are meant as a starting point for discussion, not an end.


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## dd.stevenson (Jul 23, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I would urge both authors to re-visit their ideas with an eye towards the connotations of the terms they choose (snip)



I would have a lot more respect for this viewpoint if you provided us with your alternative preferred terms.


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## Campbell (Jul 23, 2014)

As far as I'm concerned having relatively balanced encounters isn't about if you want meaningful decisions - it's a question of where you want the meaningful decisions. It's about tightening the feedback loop, providing more visceral and immediate consequences for decisions.


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## innerdude (Jul 23, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> Interesting Decisions
> 1.  Campaign choices including interactions with significant NPCs.  The idea of seeking goals outside the dungeon.
> 2.  Tactical choices while inside combat.  The proper use of various abilities and powers.
> 3.  Strategic choices.  Picking when and where you want to fight your battles.  Setting up an enemy prior to battle.  Laying traps.
> ...




It's not a complete dichotomy for many players. There can definitely exist a spectrum between these, or even a three- or four-pronged spectrum. 

That said . . . I know for a fact a massive schism exists in one of my groups right now where this is very distinct separation. I'm all about interesting decisions, interacting with the world, making interesting strategic and tactical choices, etc. 

And then there's one guy who's . . . not. He's absolutely a "Wish Fullment-ist," to the Nth degree. To the point that he largely has no interest in playing ANY campaign where he can't bend the rules to reach the appropriate level of fulfillment. He powergames like mad, and actively LOOKS for situations where his powergaming can manipulate the setting. If he can't [Eesma from _Emperor's New Groove_] "feeeeeeel the power" [/Eesma] oozing from his character at virtually every turn, he basically tunes out and starts screwing with the GM / campaign. The other players in the group swear that he's actually a very good GM, it's just when he's a player that this happens. Personally I've never cared for his play style, to the point that I don't really have any interest in playing a game he runs.


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## Libramarian (Jul 23, 2014)

Campbell said:


> As far as I'm concerned having relatively balanced encounters isn't about if you want meaningful decisions - it's a question of where you want the meaningful decisions. It's about tightening the feedback loop, providing more visceral and immediate consequences for decisions.




Good post! I think that's right.

The tradeoff for tightening the feedback loop is that the drama of the game is spread out more evenly among all the decisions, rather than being all bunched up at the end of a series of decisions with a looser feedback loop.

It's kind of like basketball vs. association football, to describe CaS and CaW as two sports (and hopefully make *Tony Vargas* feel better).

CaS = basketball. Each team takes ~80 shots a game, hitting around half of them. The winner is the team that is slightly stingier on defense and/or slightly more efficient on offense. Consequently each make/miss is not in itself very dramatic (at least until the game comes down to the wire). Feedback loops are short; most of the good plays directly lead to a bucket or missed chance for the other team. It's easy to spot the good plays but harder to spot the good players because there are so many good plays in each game by various players (as in baseball, you need to use statistical analysis to accurately rank the non-star players...but I digress).

CaW = association football. Each team only gets a handful of scoring chances per game, so they're full of drama. When a player misses a good chance it's like that Simpsons' episode where Lisa rejects Ralph Wiggum: if you play it in slow motion you can pinpoint the second his heart rips in half. Scoring chances are created like a glass of water tipping over: at first somebody on defense makes a slight, seemingly innocuous mistake, but then you realize that an offensive player happened to be in just the right place to take advantage, and he makes a good pass...and you sit up straighter and straighter as it dawns on you that this is snowballing to a scoring chance. Feedback loops are sloppy: many, many passes are made between scoring chances that don't seem to have any obvious purpose. It's hard to see the value of most individual plays but at the end of a match one or two players get most of the glory.

Basketball is more of a designer sport. The rules committee debates things like whether or not the 3 point line should be moved back another two feet to incentivize more mid-range shots, or whether the shot clock should be reduced or extended another few seconds. Association football is more organic: very simple rules-wise with very interesting emergent properties. The play is sloppier but the rules are more elegant.

Can't say that I love every edition of D&D but I do love watching both basketball and association football.

In the football leagues in Europe the team at the bottom of the standings moves down a division next season, which I also love. Level drain


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## Campbell (Jul 23, 2014)

[MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION], excellent post. Wish I could XP. You pretty much cut to the core of the play styles. For what it's worth these days I'm finding 4e to be a very immature incarnation of its design ethos as far as relaying the immediate resolution of stakes. Dungeon World and other Powered by Apocalypse games really do what I think 4e was trying to do much better. In the Dungeon World play by post Manbearcat is running every decision feels critical because there are far more consequences attached to each decision. I find it helps that complete success or failure is pretty rare - it's far more common to get what you're after, but have to sacrifice something else in the fiction.


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## Bluenose (Jul 23, 2014)

Campbell said:


> @_*Libramarian*_, excellent post. Wish I could XP. You pretty much cut to the core of the play styles. For what it's worth these days I'm finding 4e to be a very immature incarnation of its design ethos as far as relaying the immediate resolution of stakes. Dungeon World and other Powered by Apocalypse games really do what I think 4e was trying to do much better. In the Dungeon World play by post Manbearcat is running every decision feels critical because there are far more consequences attached to each decision. I find it helps that complete success or failure is pretty rare - it's far more common to get what you're after, but have to sacrifice something else in the fiction.




Can you imagine how well that approach would have gone down in a game with _Dungeons & Dragons_ on the cover? Even the very tentative steps in that direction 4e took were too much for some players, so I can't imagine the reception would have been better if it had gone further. Quite the reverse, in fact. 

Oh, and covered for xp on Libramarian.


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## Campbell (Jul 23, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> Can you imagine how well that approach would have gone down in a game with _Dungeons & Dragons_ on the cover? Even the very tentative steps in that direction 4e took were too much for some players, so I can't imagine the reception would have been better if it had gone further. Quite the reverse, in fact.
> 
> Oh, and covered for xp on Libramarian.





I get that completely. The forum battles over _Through Death's Eyes_ would make _Come and Get It_ seem tame in comparison. There is a very vocal and visceral resistance to the mainstreaming of indie RPG design conceits going on right now just like the early aughts brought a visceral reaction towards the mainstreaming of heavy GM force, high setting fidelity play popularized by Vampire. I don't find it surprising that Zak S and the RPG Pundit were paid consultants on 5e whereas Vincent Baker was not. I'm slightly disappointed, but not surprised.

That being said games like Dungeon World and Demon - The Descent reach into meta game mechanics in areas that are more traditionally meta (GMing principles, XP awards, outcomes, etc.) rather than in areas where players directly interface with the fiction (like action declaration).


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 23, 2014)

Libramarian said:


> CaW = association football. Each team only gets a handful of scoring chances per game, so they're full of drama. When a player misses a good chance it's like that Simpsons' episode where Lisa rejects Ralph Wiggum: if you play it in slow motion you can pinpoint the second his heart rips in half. Scoring chances are created like a glass of water tipping over: at first somebody on defense makes a slight, seemingly innocuous mistake, but then you realize that an offensive player happened to be in just the right place to take advantage, and he makes a good pass...and you sit up straighter and straighter as it dawns on you that this is snowballing to a scoring chance. Feedback loops are sloppy: many, many passes are made between scoring chances that don't seem to have any obvious purpose. It's hard to see the value of most individual plays but at the end of a match one or two players get most of the glory.




I don't see how soccer could be described as CaW - since your team doesn't have the option of, say, ambushing the opposing team at Hooters the night before and beating the stuffing out of them.  Or hiring fans in the stadium to take potshots at the goalie.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 23, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I don't see how soccer could be described as CaW - since your team doesn't have the option of, say, ambushing the opposing team at Hooters the night before and beating the stuffing out of them.  Or hiring fans in the stadium to take potshots at the goalie.




Indeed. CaW would be long-pre-association football. The game played between two entire towns/villages, where they had to roll a barrel (or what have you) to the other town, and which did indeed involve such shenanigans.

Football is total CaS, it's just a slower-paced sport than basketball.


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## Umbran (Jul 23, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Sounds like a re-hash of CaW vs CaS.  Which is to say, nothing more than broadly implying that anyone who doesn't play in the OneTrueWay is a spoiled child.




Except, of course, until you go look at the link in the OP, and you see....



> *Wish-fulfillment can still have choice*
> But in many cases, to implement wish-fulfillment the designer/writer eliminates the larger choices in order to guide a story to a conclusion
> As in, say, Mass Effect 3?
> Role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons provide the bridge between the two
> ...




So, Tony, you should probably revise your opinion on the matter.


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## Emerikol (Jul 23, 2014)

Keep in mind folks that this discussion is about how you play any edition of D&D and not a topic for an edition war.  The person who I believe was primarily focused on wish fulfillment was no fan of 4e.   I personally am in the opposite camp and I'm no fan of 4e either.  So in my mind there is no edition connection.  It's how you play in general.

Another question you could ask that relates to the above question is how great a challenge do you want in the pursuit of your goals.  A person who puts wish far ahead of choices might want only a modest challenge.  The act of living out the adventure and appearing heroic is satisfying without the need to wrack your brain for the perfect move.  

Now I think I lean toward choices so I'm just trying hard here to be fair to both sides.   If you imagine the sort of stress you incur when you are really invested in a movie character who is running for his life, a good stress so stress may not be the right word, then that is part of what I call challenge or interesting choices.  You feel imperiled and you have to make decisions that often have lots of consequences.  How hard do you want those decisions to be?


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 23, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> If you imagine the sort of stress you incur when *you are really invested in a movie character who is running for his life*, a good stress so stress may not be the right word, then that is part of what I call challenge or interesting choices.  You feel imperiled and you have to make decisions that often have lots of consequences.  How hard do you want those decisions to be?




Most action movies are pretty much pure wish-fulfillment, including, nay, _especially_ ones where the bolded bit happens much. So... may want to rethink this example. It seems to show you wish-fulfillment can be tense or something!


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## Emerikol (Jul 23, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Most action movies are pretty much pure wish-fulfillment, including, nay, _especially_ ones where the bolded bit happens much. So... may want to rethink this example. It seems to show you wish-fulfillment can be tense or something!




It can be.  It's kind of silly to define wish fulfillment as getting what you want.  That means all playstyles are wish fulfillment because it's all about getting what we want out of a game right?

It's just like GNS.  Every single roleplaying game in the universe has elements of all three.  The design of the game though respects one more than another.  Or it provides a way if it's trying to target all audiences for the game to respect one more than the other.   So saying you are a simulationist is akin to saying S > N > G or S > G > N.   People should rank their preferences instead of saying they are just an S.   There are people who claim S who then fight over whether G or N should come next.   

Same thing for wish fulfillment versus difficult choices.  I might say "challenges" instead of choices to better illustrate my point.  In a wish fulfillment game you are going to get what you want no matter what.   In a difficult choices game, there are going to be roadblocks to getting what you want and it is possible you won't actually your goal UNLESS your goal is purely difficult choices.   

My players want to start out as nobodies and scratch and claw their way up through the world and society until they become premier movers and shakers in the world.   Their real goal though is the scratching and clawing and not the final destination.  The process of achieving the goal is really what they find fun.

Other people want to realize a concept.  They do not really want there to be a chance of failure when it comes to achieving that goal.  Their fun is actually being their goal.  That does not mean that there aren't all kinds of choices along the way.  Nothing gets in the way ultimately though of the wish fulfillment.


I hope maybe that clarifies the discussion a little.  

One tool valuable for the wish fulfillment camp is the fail forward concept.  Even with setbacks you keep moving towards the goal.  Not saying it can't be used by anyway see my earlier discussion but I do think it fits wish fulfillment like a glove.


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## ExploderWizard (Jul 23, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I also don't really buy that there are players who totally don't want to be challenged. I do buy that were are groups where the players don't like to see TPKs frequently and are disinterested in scenarios where their PCs have a high chance of dying, but that doesn't align with hard/easy. You can have something that's very simple and straightforward, and even fair, and yet ultra-lethal and thus no fun to them, or you can have something where the chances of death of PCs is absolute zero, but the chances of failure at what they are doing is extremely high unless they play it very smart (trying to thwart someone who probably can't kill them, but does want to achieve something that they oppose, for example).




There are players who do not want to be challenged, they are only interested in their _characters _being challenged. It is an important distinction. This is connected to a preference for either gameplay or storytelling as a primary purpose of the game. If death is viewed as a nigh-unacceptable outcome in a narrative then the game has taken a secondary role to the storytelling. 

Likewise difficulty can be measured in levels for both the players and their characters. Views on chances of character death can vary widely especially when player input has a great deal more impact on those chances than character capabilities. If smart decisions by the players can mitigate shortcomings in character abilities then more dangerous games have greater appeal. This is where system matters the most. Does success or failure depend largely on player decisions or more heavily on how good the character is in a mathematical sense? In the former case a highly lethal game can be overcome by intelligent play, in the latter case not as much.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 23, 2014)

Umbran said:


> Except, of course, until you go look at the link in the OP, and you see....
> 
> 
> 
> So, Tony, you should probably revise your opinion on the matter.



Let me revise that:

I didn't click through to outside article, but what the OP had to say in his post, sounds like nothing more than  a re-hash of CaW vs CaS. Which is to say, nothing more than broadly implying that anyone who doesn't play in the OneTrueWay is a spoiled child.


I mean, it's not hard to see the differences in the connotations of "interesting choices" (just two fairly positive words with no special meaning as a phrase)  vs the connotations of "wish fulfillment" (a term used in psychoanalysis, and suggestive, to the layman, of childishness and mental illness).


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## Agamon (Jul 23, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I don't see how soccer could be described as CaW - since your team doesn't have the option of, say, ambushing the opposing team at Hooters the night before and beating the stuffing out of them.  Or hiring fans in the stadium to take potshots at the goalie.




Okay, change association football to Blood Bowl.


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## Emerikol (Jul 23, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Let me revise that:
> 
> I didn't click through to outside article, but what the OP had to say in his post, sounds like nothing more than  a re-hash of CaW vs CaS. Which is to say, nothing more than broadly implying that anyone who doesn't play in the OneTrueWay is a spoiled child.
> 
> ...




Well let me say given I am the OP that I meant nothing negative at all about either side.  I thought the phrase used by Pulsiper captured something that I'd been wrestling with in the past.  

I find the analysis of playstyles both interesting and helpful.  The best thing in roleplaying that ever happened was when I came on the wotc boards and I started learning about the various divides and came to understand my own.  Now instead of stumbling and bumbling around often accidentally using something that in the end was detrimental to my enjoyment of the game I was able to do far better.  This enriches everyone's games whichever style you seek.   I'm not even saying some people can't enjoy a variety of styles.  I'm sure they do.  It is still wise for a DM to know what style of game he is running and the players know that too.

I don't recognize those acronyms CaW vs CaS could you elaborate and tell me the full names.

I don't believe in the OneTrueWay.  I'm not 100% I even believe in exactly OneTrueWay for me.  When I do play though I am true to my own preferences and as a result I have a lot of fun.  I really don't care what other groups do.  Like everyone else who has a history with D&D, we'd like that game to at least support our playstyle.  Just like you I'm guessing.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 23, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> It can be.  It's kind of silly to define wish fulfillment as getting what you want.  That means all playstyles are wish fulfillment because it's all about getting what we want out of a game right?




Absolutely, so perhaps a different term is warranted?



Emerikol said:


> Well let me say given I am the OP that I meant nothing negative at all about either side.  I thought the phrase used by Pulsiper captured something that I'd been wrestling with in the past.




He's a hardcore one-tru-way-ist, though, and very clear about it.

I think there is a really good, interesting discussion here, but phrases like "wish fulfillment" muddy the waters (more in that they are confusing than negative - but that's an issue too). Is there a clearer one? I haven't thought of it yet, but if I do I'll add it in. If you think of one, please say!


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 23, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> Well let me say given I am the OP that I meant nothing negative at all about either side.  I thought the phrase used by Pulsiper captured something that I'd been wrestling with in the past.



 Intentional or not, using a neutral/positive term for one half of the population, and one implying mental illness for the other half suggestive of a degree of bias.  It may very well be that said bias is what you've been wrestling with (and it's clearly got you in a wicked submission hold).



> I find the analysis of playstyles both interesting and helpful.  The best thing in roleplaying that ever happened was when I came on the wotc boards and I started learning about the various divides and came to understand my own.  Now instead of stumbling and bumbling around often accidentally using something that in the end was detrimental to my enjoyment of the game I was able to do far better.



 I get it.  You like identifying with an in-group and feeling included and justified in your preferences.  Really, a perfectly normal human impulse, arguably an adaptive trait in an evolutionary sense, and at the back of everything from positives like patriotism and altruism to the worst examples of bigotry and persecution.  

But it is really easy to unconsciously slip from the positive manifestations to the negative ones.  So be alert for slipping bias into things like this.

Better yet, pick the favored 'style' and talk about it without contrasting it to the disfavored one.  If this post had been titled "Interesting Decisions," and not gone into the negatively-labeled contrast, there'd've been no problem, for instance.  Well, one fewer problem.



> I don't recognize those acronyms CaW vs CaS could you elaborate and tell me the full names.



 Just more us/them posturing left over from the edition war.  You'd be firmly 'CaW,' and thus label me 'CaS' because I tend not to agree with you much.  The last thing you need is yet another neat set of labels for your armed camp and the 'enemies' besieging it, so I'll futilely urge you not to look into it.

Edit:  Nevermind, you've already embraced it:
http://community.wizards.com/forum/dd-next-general-discussion/threads/4089436




> Like everyone else who has a history with D&D, we'd like that game to at least support our playstyle.  Just like you I'm guessing.



 Keep guessing, if you like, I'm not going there.

I will go into what's meant by 'support.'  I would like a game like D&D to 'support' as many playstyles as possible in the sense of /allowing/ them to be played without penalty.  The flip side of that is no one playstyle can be elevated, assumed, or rewarded, either.  That last is what many folks seem to mean when they say they want their style 'supported' - they seem to actually want to see it encouraged, rewarded, or even 'forced' by default as the only way to play the game successfully - while other styles are discouraged, disparaged, punished, or even excluded completely.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 23, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> Can you imagine how well that approach would have gone down in a game with _Dungeons & Dragons_ on the cover? Even the very tentative steps in that direction 4e took were too much for some players, so I can't imagine the reception would have been better if it had gone further. Quite the reverse, in fact.
> 
> Oh, and covered for xp on Libramarian.






Campbell said:


> I get that completely. The forum battles over _Through Death's Eyes_ would make _Come and Get It_ seem tame in comparison.




I had similar commentary in another thread not too long ago I believe.  Giving martial characters powerful, open-descriptor divinations (is it uncanny intuition or something more?) would definitely take the sunshine right out of some folks' day and turn their NOTD&D dial up to 10.

Its unfortunate because if I could recommend one thing to pure D&D GMs, it would be to diversify your perspective and toolset through GMing other games with various agendas/principles and all that comes with it.  It will round out your game such that when you do go back to D&D, your experience and your players' experience will be the better for it.  Even if its just to know for certain what you want to stay away from, why, and how to stay away from it.  I can state unequivocally that a diverse GMing experience has improved my D&D GMing.  How could it not?


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 23, 2014)

ExploderWizard said:


> There are players who do not want to be challenged, they are only interested in their _characters _being challenged. It is an important distinction. This is connected to a preference for either gameplay or storytelling as a primary purpose of the game. If death is viewed as a nigh-unacceptable outcome in a narrative then the game has taken a secondary role to the storytelling.




Does anyone else think that, ultimately, a DM should encourage the players to _want _to be challenged?  As a difficulty curve thing?  If you're not challenged by the game you play, you might lose interest and stop.



Emerikol said:


> I don't recognize those acronyms CaW vs CaS could you elaborate and tell me the full names.




Ignore Tony.  It's a similar debate about game style that some people think of as a criticism of a particular edition.  Combat as War vs. Combat as Sport is basically an issue tangentially related to GNS, about whether you expect a combat to be approached using every available resource - including outside-the-rules thinking - to defeat opposition, or whether you expect a combat to be within agreed-upon parameters.  It was suggested as being a root cause for why some people find a particular edition dissatisfying for their style of play.


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## Umbran (Jul 23, 2014)

ExploderWizard said:


> If death is viewed as a nigh-unacceptable outcome in a narrative then the game has taken a secondary role to the storytelling.




That is only true if removal from the game ("death") is the only recognized failure condition.

I played a cooperative (non-RP) game on the July 4th weekend, called "Sentinels of the Multiverse".  Each player chooses a superhero from the set, and plays cards and makes choices for that hero.  All players are aligned against a non-player antagonist villain, and the environment.

It is possible for a player to run out of hit points.  In this case, they are not fully removed from the game - their choices are merely shrunk down to a very short list - but they still get to choose, and have some effect on the game.  *Nobody* is fully removed from play until the end of the game - so the game is won or lost not by individuals, but by all players (as is usual for cooperative games).  This isn't about gameplay taking a secondary role, this game doesn't have storytelling in the RPG sense - but merely allowing everyone to continue to have amusement until the session of play ends.

Given that RPGs are largely a cooperative endeavor, there is no reason why we could not define our win and loss conditions in a similar manner.  Or, as I'm fairly sure you've heard before - death is not the only negative consequence upon which we can measure success in an RPG.


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## Rod Staffwand (Jul 23, 2014)

This seems like a restating of the eternal "roll-play" vs. "role-play" debate, players preferences for which will be highly subjective and, often, will be some mixture of the two (which are not mutually exclusive). Perhaps the best use for such analysis is to help people understand their own preferences and how to communicate them to other players so that everyone in the group is on the same page with what the gaming style will be.

For game designers, Pulsipher's intended audience, the analysis in useful so that they can create mechanics that appeal to one type of play or another. It is easier to create a game with coherent design if you can define what it is you are trying to create. How is the player encouraged to interact with the world? As a tactician carefully weighing every choice in order to extract maximum benefit? As an alternate persona with their own attitudes, strengths and even flaws? As a combination of the two or something else entirely?


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## ExploderWizard (Jul 23, 2014)

Umbran said:


> That is only true if removal from the game ("death") is the only recognized failure condition.
> 
> I played a cooperative (non-RP) game on the July 4th weekend, called "Sentinels of the Multiverse".  Each player chooses a superhero from the set, and plays cards and makes choices for that hero.  All players are aligned against a non-player antagonist villain, and the environment.
> 
> ...




I agree that not every failure needs to be fatal to make an interesting game because there is a lot more that goes into an interesting game than combat.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 23, 2014)

Rod Staffwand said:


> This seems like a restating of the eternal "roll-play" vs. "role-play" debate, players preferences for which will be highly subjective and, often, will be some mixture of the two (which are not mutually exclusive). Perhaps the best use for such analysis is to help people understand their own preferences and how to communicate them to other players so that everyone in the group is on the same page with what the gaming style will be.



I'm suspicious of any theory that professes to provide some useful insight about the people participating in the hobby when it does nothing more than draw an imagined line through the lot, sort everyone onto one side or the other, and proceed to talk up one side and/or disparage the other.  That's what the Roll vs Role debate was, in a big way.  That's what CaW vs CaS was.  Heck, that's what the Edition War was.

A useful theory would likely identify more than two (or 3, like GNS) 'kinds of gamers,' and would certainly concentrate on describing them, not just contrasting and judging them.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 23, 2014)

On a related note:

Extra Credits - Choices vs. Consequences


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## Rod Staffwand (Jul 23, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I'm suspicious of any theory that professes to provide some useful insight about the people participating in the hobby when it does nothing more than draw an imagined line through the lot, sort everyone onto one side or the other, and proceed to talk up one side and/or disparage the other.  That's what the Roll vs Role debate was, in a big way.  That's what CaW vs CaS was.  Heck, that's what the Edition War was.
> 
> A useful theory would likely identify more than two (or 3, like GNS) 'kinds of gamers,' and would certainly concentrate on describing them, not just contrasting and judging them.




It is entirely possible to have a discussion about play styles and campaign expectations without disparaging comments. It is, in fact, a successful requirement for enjoyable long-term gaming. Roll vs. Role isn't exactly a theory as there are indeed players of both persuasions out in the world at this very moment--and far more that use a mixture of styles (either simultaneously or differing via campaign). There is no controversy here, other than the fact that the play styles are not "vs." each other at all or that either one is better than the other. It is an objective fact that gamers have had fun playing the full spectrum and beyond. Adherents of particular styles may attempt to convince others of the advantages of their methods, and some might even be swayed to at least dabble in a different style after hearing a sound argument.

Granted, some partisans of particular editions and styles like to claim superiority of their own beliefs and attempt to use all manner of faulty reasoning to bolster their arguments. They don't do this to gain converts, they do it to feel better about themselves because, for some reason, their method of gaming has become so ingrained in their personality, that anyone who merely chooses differently is seen as insulting them. These voices have nothing to contribute to the discussion and are best ignored.

Far more common are those that favor a particular style and, through their enthusiasm for it (along with artless phrasing) seem to disparage other styles. If an author happens to leave out an "IMO" when dealing with subjective issues, it's best to mentally insert one in there and not read an honest exploration of styles as a partisan screed. We should all judge based on what is said, not on what we think is implied.

Getting back to the thread at hand, I wasn't a fan of Pulsipher's presentation. I thought it was poorly structured and lacking in details and examples, and the terminology is a bit loaded: "interesting choices" vs. "wish fulfillment". But his core concern is sound. I also think the OP's definitions of wish-fulfillment and interesting decisions are a bit all over the place [The pleasure of seeing your enemies destroyed in spectacular fashion--really? This is 100% of gamers]. But both went out of their way to state this was a subjective discussion with no right answer.

I had similar problems with the "Combat as Sport" and "Combat as War" phrasing, neither of which was a good fit for what they were supposed to represent and the unbalanced terminology between sport and war was ludicrous at best. Combat as Sport vs. Combat as Pretend War is better, but it's still not a useful approach.

I've found that Cinematic vs. Wargame is about as neutral as you can get, with the expectation that it IS a continuum with the vast majority of players, DMs and campaigns falling somewhere in the middle (the exact point of which may change from session to session). The cinematic player wants to play out the setpiece dragon battle. The wargame player wants to trump the setpiece dragon battle by inventing explosives and using them to trap the dragon in his cave. Both appeal to different parts of the brain. No one goes to see a James Bond movie in which Seal Team Six caps the villain in the first five minutes. No one reads The Art of War for the sex scenes.

The good news is that there are more game systems today than ever before, with modern technology allowing real-time play with people all over the world. It's easier now to find or run a game to your liking and it's far easier to be exposed to new ideas and new ways to play. If we aren't hitting a Golden Age of Gaming, I don't know what will do it.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 23, 2014)

Rod Staffwand said:


> I've found that Cinematic vs. Wargame is about as neutral as you can get,




Don't know about "wargame" - as the wargames most players are familiar with don't allow for improvised, outside-the-box tactics.  But role-playing as a whole has an ancestor in a German training exercise called "Free Kriegspiel" - which was, I understand, a wargame in-the-military-sense with a referee to adjudicate the success of things like sabotage attempts or improvised tactics.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 23, 2014)

Rod Staffwand said:


> Roll vs. Role isn't exactly a theory as there are indeed players of both persuasions out in the world at this very moment--and far more that use a mixture of styles (either simultaneously or differing via campaign). There is no controversy here, other than the fact that the play styles are not "vs." each other at all or that either one is better than the other. It is an objective fact that gamers have had fun playing the full spectrum and beyond.



 Which, really, contradicts the Role vs Roll theory - that all gamers are one or the other, not both, and that Role is somehow superior.  (And, hey, if that's not the theory, a whole lotta folks on the Role side of it were misrepresenting it in the 90s.)

Like I said, I have no problem with theorizing.  I just question the value of us/them theories that look too much like the theorist just boosting his own ego and/or shoring up his own preconceived notions.  



> The good news is that there are more game systems today than ever before, with modern technology allowing real-time play with people all over the world. It's easier now to find or run a game to your liking and it's far easier to be exposed to new ideas and new ways to play. If we aren't hitting a Golden Age of Gaming, I don't know what will do it.



 I guess one way in which I am a grognard traditionalist is that on-line play 'just doesn't feel like a real RPG' to me.  ;(


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## billd91 (Jul 23, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> I had similar commentary in another thread not too long ago I believe. Giving martial characters powerful, open-descriptor divinations (is it uncanny intuition or something more?) would definitely take the sunshine right out of some folks' day and turn their NOTD&D dial up to 10.
> 
> Its unfortunate because if I could recommend one thing to pure D&D GMs, it would be to diversify your perspective and toolset through GMing other games with various agendas/principles and all that comes with it.  It will round out your game such that when you do go back to D&D, your experience and your players' experience will be the better for it.  Even if its just to know for certain what you want to stay away from, why, and how to stay away from it.  I can state unequivocally that a diverse GMing experience has improved my D&D GMing.  How could it not?




I can say that playing and GMing other games has enriched my ability to run D&D as well. But I can also say it has enabled me to *appreciate D&D for what it is*... and appreciate other games for what they are, in contrast to each other, and choose the game I want to get the fit I want.


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## Manbearcat (Jul 23, 2014)

billd91 said:


> I can say that playing and GMing other games has enriched my ability to run D&D as well. But I can also say it has enabled me to *appreciate D&D for what it is*... and appreciate other games for what they are, in contrast to each other, and choose the game I want to get the fit I want.




Is that the:

1)  FFV Murderhoboing dudes and taking their stuff with a stable of disposable PCs, played from pawn stance or the
2)  GM-Force illusionism so the rules, your action declarations, and the resolution of them don't matter because my setting and metaplot are important, ok (?) or the 
3)  LFQW turned up to 11ty9, Ars Magica is amateur hour, back to the dungeon errrr process sim except when it isn't, or the
4)  Miniatures skirmish boardgame linked by free-form roleplay

D&D?  Or something else entirely like say dungeons...and dragons...and orcs...and elves...and hit points...and armor class...and classes...and quests...and mcguffins.

EDIT - Oh and daily spells


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## Ratskinner (Jul 24, 2014)

Having ruminated on the article for a few days now....I don't believe it offers any useful insight into game design or player behavior or preferences. It rests on an, IMO, false dichotomy of two sources of in-play enjoyment, and ignores or is unaware of the diversity and complexity of player preferences and behavior outside of a narrow band of...let's call it quaint...competitive environments.

Talking about "interesting decisions" is fine. Talking about "wish fulfillment" is fine. Talking about "interesting decisions" vs. "Wish fulfillment" borders on nonsensical.


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## pemerton (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> Interesting Decisions
> 1.  Campaign choices including interactions with significant NPCs.  The idea of seeking goals outside the dungeon.
> 2.  Tactical choices while inside combat.  The proper use of various abilities and powers.
> 3.  Strategic choices.  Picking when and where you want to fight your battles.  Setting up an enemy prior to battle.  Laying traps.
> ...



As you have stated it, I don't feel the force of the contrast.

For instance, ID1 (interaction with significant NPCs) can lead to WF2 (being given respect by NPCs). ID2&5 (tactical choices involving resource management) can lead to WF1 (the pleasure of seeing your enemies destroyed in spectacular fashion). Etc.

Generalising: your "interesting decisions" describe challenges the players might have to resolve (via their PCs). Your "wish fulfilment" items 1 and 2 are outcomes.

WF4 is completely orthogonal to both - Moldvay Basic, fr instance, handwaves all time not spent in the dungeon, but almost certainly falls on the side that you are wanting to call "interesting decisions". In fact, one of the best ways to ensure a lot of interesting decisions in play is to handwave a lot of tedious stuff which, whether or not it requires decisions, doesn't require _interesting_ decisions.

Finally, I don't understand WF3. When I try to contrast it with (say) ID1&4, I can't draw any contrast. Thus, for instance: choices about puzzles and traps are going to be driven by flavour and effect, aren't they? Eg if there is a flooding room trap, then solutions will include looking for furniture that floats (when I ran this particular scenario in my 4e game, the items of furniture in question were coffins). Or, when negotiating with important NPCs, flavour and effect are going to be very important: eg whether or not Kas will make friends with you might depend on whether or not you are an ally of Vecna.

If someone asked me to reflect on games where the players didn't have to make interesting choices, I wouldn't be thinking about games displaying your items WF1 through Wf4. I would be thinking about games where mechanics didn't matter to resolution; where the GM disregarded the players' action declarations for their PCs; where the GM railroaded some pre-written plot without regard to player desires as manifested through the play of their PCs; etc. None of which have much to do with WF1 through WF4, and most of which seem to be about the _GM's_ wish fulfilment rather than the players'.


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## pemerton (Jul 24, 2014)

I followed the link in the OP, and read the text there (but didn't watch the video).

Here is Pulsipher's summary of "wish fulfillment":

_Games as wish-fulfillment, as “an experience”_​
In D&D terms, this is all about immersion - about "being there, as my character".

In Forge/GNS terms, this is all about simulation - "the right to dream".

Of the various RPG systems I have played over the years, CoC is the best at delivering this - at creating "an experience" of being there, of going mad as mind and spirit are ground down by otherwordly forces.

This reinforces my post above this one, that [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION]'s WF1 through WF4 are't capturing anything that contrasts with "interesting decisions". CoC isn't about respect, or ploughing through enemies, or even handwaving. (It does involve flavour and effect.)

The contrast that Pulsipher is drawing, based on those summaries, is basically the same one that Ron Edwards draws when he contrast simulationism (no overt metagame in play) with gamism and narrativism (both embrace the metagame, though to different ends - "step on up" challenges in the first case, "story now" dramatic resolution in the second case).


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## Emerikol (Jul 24, 2014)

But every single one of these Forge theories are not mutually exclusive.  They are priorities.  I explained myself earlier and you really didn't address it so I won't repeat.

The player I ran into basically said that he felt my game was too challenging.  I kept the group too stressed out fighting for their survival.  He enjoys a game that while still having combats and so forth is not one that worries him especially.  The fun for him is using cool powers to do cool things.  

Whereas, other players want to fight and claw their way to every goal.  The fighting and clawing though is the real goal.  The artificial reward goal is just symbolic of the completion of the journey.


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## Emerikol (Jul 24, 2014)

pemerton said:


> As you have stated it, I don't feel the force of the contrast.





Maybe my one sentence response is...
One is about overcoming obstacles and the other is about being something.  Again not mutually exclusive but there is a difference.  See my other recent post for more thoughts.

Edit:
Another thought.   A completely 100% sold out wish fulfillment person would be happy if the DM fudged dice all the time as long as he didn't know.  Now that is the extreme end of that position.   It's more about roleplaying a role and less about a challenging game.

The interesting choices extreme would be chess.


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## Hussar (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> But every single one of these Forge theories are not mutually exclusive.  They are priorities.  I explained myself earlier and you really didn't address it so I won't repeat.
> 
> The player I ran into basically said that he felt my game was too challenging.  I kept the group too stressed out fighting for their survival.  He enjoys a game that while still having combats and so forth is not one that worries him especially.  The fun for him is using cool powers to do cool things.
> 
> Whereas, other players want to fight and claw their way to every goal.  The fighting and clawing though is the real goal.  The artificial reward goal is just symbolic of the completion of the journey.




But, the problem is Emerikol, your fighting and clawing is largely an illusion. It has to be unless you are constantly whacking pc's. 

If a fight is truly "skin of the teeth" then there needs to be a significant chance of PC death. But, if every encounter is like that but PCs aren't dying, the the odds of PC death must actually be much lower. 

I would argue that if you scratch beneath the surface, your game is far closer to wish fulfillment than you might think. 

To clarify, in the last ten combat encounters in your game, how many pcs died?  How many pcs die per level?


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 24, 2014)

Iosue said:


> Here is the original CaS/CaW post by Daztur.  It is entirely respectful and fair to both sides.  His examples of play are entirely edition agnostic.




The original post was trying to figure something out out loud.  It was interesting, worth reading, and reaching to something useful.  The way CaW/CaS has been used since (right down to I think someone having a sig reading "I like Combat as War") has been not particularly well disguised edition warring.

The elephant in the room is that there's almost never such a thing as Combat as War.  A dungeon is approximately as artificial an environment as the assault course on Sasuke/American Ninja Warrior.  The PCs are well enough armed, and this is a feature, that they resemble big game hunters on a safari - yes you can mess up.  But the odds are stacked in your favour.  And minimising risk while bringing back the head of a lion is a good thing.



dd.stevenson said:


> I would have a lot more respect for this viewpoint if you provided us with your alternative preferred terms.




Strategic and tactical focus.


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## Emerikol (Jul 24, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, the problem is Emerikol, your fighting and clawing is largely an illusion. It has to be unless you are constantly whacking pc's.
> 
> If a fight is truly "skin of the teeth" then there needs to be a significant chance of PC death. But, if every encounter is like that but PCs aren't dying, the the odds of PC death must actually be much lower.
> 
> ...




I disagree with your premise.  A hard game does not have to result in a failure.  

The game can be hard because of the effort you have to spend even if you are successful.

I think many groups would initially die if I DMd them.  Then if they were smart and most gamers are theyd adjust or quit my game.  Soke players really don't want to have their wits taxed.


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## Hussar (Jul 24, 2014)

I wonder if the difference isn't more strategic vs logistical.  Tactics refer to what you do after you are engaged with an enemy.  Tactics are very short term and tend to be reflected in D&D in round by round decisions.  

Strategy, on the other hand, is more long term - things like scry/buff/teleport routines are strategic, rather than tactical.  Decisions about how to clear a dungeon (using a dungeon crawl as an example) like sending the scout forward to gather information, various skill uses like tracking and whatnot, taking prisoners for questioning/charming are all good examples of strategic play.  

Logistical play is much more what I think of when I think of old school style play.  Bringing in how much food, wagons for carrying supplies, tracking supplies that sort of thing.  Additionally, older versions of D&D supported this much better by making virtually everything other than the most basic of actions, a very limited resource.  Healing was extremely limited - not only no wands of cure light wounds, but, no healing spells at 2nd or 3rd level.  You had nothing but cure light wounds spells until your cleric hit 7th level.  Couple that with fairly slow healing and logistical play becomes extremely important.  Add in the length of time it can take to regain spells (IIRC, 15 minutes/spell level/spell after your 8 hours of rest) means that the Magic User is pretty much limited to his or her initial load out of spells, plus whatever scrolls and whatnot you can find along the way.

These two play styles -strategic vs logistical are where the big difference is, IMO.  3e supports strategic play very well since logistics isn't generally much of an issue.  4e actually doesn't support either terribly well, IMO, which I think is a weakness of the system.  You don't really have to worry about logistics at all - you aren't even supposed to track ammunition, and strategic play isn't generally as much of an issue since the focus is so strongly on the encounter.  Within an encounter, you have a richness of tactical choices that leaves any other edition in the dust, but, because there aren't really any major decision points between encounters, at least as far as combat is concerned, strategic play isn't a major issue.  It's all about the tactics.

This is one area where I'm rather glad 5e has focused more on the scenario as a base unit of time, rather than the encounter.  3e's weakness was in tactical play.  Once you found a tactic - usually because you spent feats, or chose a certain suite of spells - you spam the heck out of that tactic.  You have "trip build" fighters, for example, where every single encounter, virtually every single attack, this fighter is going to try to trip stuff.  The rogue is constantly setting up that sneak attack because if he doesn't, he's basically a peasant with a nice sword.  That sort of thing.  Granted, I believe 3e is quite far ahead of AD&D in tactical play.  There's a lot more tactical level choices in 3e than in AD&D.  It's all a spectrum.

Hopefully, and at first blush it looks like 5e has, 5e will bridge the three levels to some degree.  You get the logistical level of play - tracking ammo, somewhat limited healing (although far more than AD&D) and hit dice allow for logistical level decisions.  The focus on the scenario rather than the single encounter makes strategic level play important and the number of powers and variety of tricks and things you can do in a round make the tactical level important as well.

It's a nice balance IMO.

((Heh, since I've now said bad things about every edition, I wonder if that makes me a meta-edition warrior.   ))


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I disagree with your premise.  A hard game does not have to result in a failure.
> 
> The game can be hard because of the effort you have to spend even if you are successful.
> 
> I think many groups would initially die if I DMd them.  Then if they  were smart and most gamers are theyd adjust or quit my game.  Soke  players really don't want to have their wits taxed.




That doesn't sound like a hard game to me.  It sounds like a game of  "Know the DM".  And that has a difficulty threshold but no serious  ramp.

Tomb of Horrors was in response to Rob Kunz and Ernie Gygax  complaining that Greyhawk was too easy.  And guess what?  They were  right. The first encounter with Tomb of Horrors resulted in all treasure  found and no PC deaths.  This is because knowing your DM is a skill -  and if they throw the same type of opposition you can master it.  And  when you've mastered it you might need to keep your wits about you, but  it's no longer hard.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 24, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I wonder if the difference isn't more strategic vs logistical.  Tactics refer to what you do after you are engaged with an enemy.  Tactics are very short term and tend to be reflected in D&D in round by round decisions.




4e is very tactical.  The extended rest being 8 hours weakens it as both a strategic and a logistical game.  You have three camps here rather than two.


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## Hussar (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I disagree with your premise.  A hard game does not have to result in a failure.
> 
> The game can be hard because of the effort you have to spend even if you are successful.
> 
> I think many groups would initially die if I DMd them.  Then if they were smart and most gamers are theyd adjust or quit my game.  Soke players really don't want to have their wits taxed.




But the math doesn't add up.  If you have a truly hard game, then there has to be a significant chance of failure.  Combat or non-combat, it doesn't matter.  If you have a 50:50 chance of success, then you will fail half the time.  If the players are succeeding virtually all the time, then your game isn't actually that hard.  It can't be.  If it was truly hard, then people would fail.  If it's possible to change the odds such that the party constantly (or nearly constantly) succeeds, then it's not really that hard.  It might be a challenge to find how to change the odds, but, the fact that the odds can be changed belies the difficulty.  

I've DM'd hard games.  Last major dungeon crawl I did, I killed a PC every three sessions over the duration of the campaign (about two years).  I had one player on his EIGHTH PC by the end of the campaign. One player actually managed to survive for 50 sessions.  The longest living PC in that campaign.  She died under a mob of Rasts that jumped the party.  No one was ever safe.

But, we knew going into that campaign that there was a high chance of failure.  

My current adventure has a pretty decent chance of a TPK.  This one's just a short one though.  Single PC level.  But, because of the adventure, they won't be able to rest and regain dailies or HP for the duration of the adventure.  I really don't expect them to succeed, but, I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.  Again, I made no bones about it going into the adventure.  I was pulling out all the stops and turning the dials to 11.

Funnily enough, there is not a single monster in the entire dungeon higher level than the party.    Fun times.

But, if your party is getting to 20th level without permanent death?  Yeah, that's not a hard campaign.


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## Henry (Jul 24, 2014)

This conversation does bring out one memory for me - one thing I found that 4e did better than 3e or Pathfinder, and that was a Monk I played. There is quite a lot of buzz among D&D gamers about the uselessness of the Monk in 3.x; in 4e, my monk was an unholy chainsaw of fury. Did I get hurt? Plenty. Did I go down to superior opponents? Absolutely. But at no time did I feel like I wasn't contributing to the party, or that I had to weigh every combat carefully and count my escape exits with each one just in case - and there's nothing wrong with that.

In the greater context, there are some days I want to hard-scrabble and get challenged, and others I want to revel in being a badass at the game table (especially if my real life work is particularly challenging in the recent past!) and the game that supports both I haven't found yet. Maybe 5e will be versatile enough in its options that I'll have found it. Guess i'll know by October.


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## Emerikol (Jul 24, 2014)

I don't necessarily think that chance of death is an indicator in general of overall difficulty.

If I had to dig a grave in the hot sun it would be hard but I'm certain of success.  Now that is a physical challenge I realize but there are mental challenges that are similar.

In my games failure to play well results in death.  Over the years, my players have learned to play well.  When they go to other campaigns they often think they are easy.  When I say hard I mean how much mental effort you exert to succeed.  

I'm a programmer by trade and I occasionally encounter a hard problem that taxes my knowledge and creativity.  I never in the end fail to solve the problem though.  That doesn't mean it wasn't hard.

In my games, characters die on occasion but not frequently.  I attribute that more to my players skill than to the easiness of my game.


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## ExploderWizard (Jul 24, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> The elephant in the room is that there's almost never such a thing as Combat as War.  A dungeon is approximately as artificial an environment as the assault course on Sasuke/American Ninja Warrior.  The PCs are well enough armed, and this is a feature, that they resemble big game hunters on a safari - yes you can mess up.  But the odds are stacked in your favour.  And minimising risk while bringing back the head of a lion is a good thing.




This is by no means universal. I see dungeons like that as something that would happen when a party goes into a dungeon level that is several levels below their own. 

A group going into territory that is considered challenging for their level might actually be part of a safari but they may sometimes be playing the role of the trophy rather than the hunter. Having that as a posiibility and not knowing when that may be the case, is where the excitement comes from.


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## Emerikol (Jul 24, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> That doesn't sound like a hard game to me.  It sounds like a game of  "Know the DM".  And that has a difficulty threshold but no serious  ramp.
> 
> Tomb of Horrors was in response to Rob Kunz and Ernie Gygax  complaining that Greyhawk was too easy.  And guess what?  They were  right. The first encounter with Tomb of Horrors resulted in all treasure  found and no PC deaths.  This is because knowing your DM is a skill -  and if they throw the same type of opposition you can master it.  And  when you've mastered it you might need to keep your wits about you, but  it's no longer hard.




I don't want to disagree with you 100% because I realize the DM is representing the laws of the universe so knowing those laws of course improves your chances of success.  I get the feeling from you though that you mean it in a far more pejorative way.  Kind of like the DM has these oddball idiosyncrasies or is predictable or something like that.  If I'm reading you wrong please explain.

I vary things a lot in my dungeons so they are definitely not predictable.  Still I think we all have to agree that combat tactics are combat tactics and good ways to move through a dungeon could be established.  It gets challenging when the unexpected happens and you have to think on your feet.  The whole point is that hard does not equate to death.  Hard is not 3 in 10 chance of death instead of 1 in 10 chance of death.   I might agree if you said "for a selection of average gamers" perhaps.   A game where you entered a room and rolled a die ten and on a 2 or better you clear the room is no easier than a game where you have to get a 5 or better.  Perhaps it's harder to not die but it's not hard as in requiring skill.   That is the kind of hard I'm talking about.  Not improbability of success.

I want skill to matter in my games.  So if you are more skillful, you lessen your chances of death.  Being more skillful is sometimes adopting best practices but it's also being creative and cunning in unexpected circumstances.  I try to create a "realistic" world which means my monsters given the setting try to act in a way that makes sense given their environment and experiences.  I play them to survive and win.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I don't necessarily think that chance of death is an indicator in general of overall difficulty.




Indeed, it's a terrible indicator, but I think that discussion has been had.



Emerikol said:


> In my games, characters die on occasion but not frequently.  I attribute that more to my players skill than to the easiness of my game.




I think your discussion of how "hard" your game, is and how "skilled" your players are is distracting you from the actual topics you set out to discuss. The thing is, it's subjective/relative how skilled your players are, and how hard your games are. Very subjective. Whether there even is such a thing as player "skill", rather than merely knowing DMs or genre conventions or the like in RPGs is a matter of debate - and probably should be in another thread.

So perhaps we could move away from that?

What we can say is, if your players are having a good time, and enjoy the tension that feel, feel like they are working hard, and enjoy that, and so on, then you're DMing them well.

Equally, if you took another group, and just TPK'd them repeatedly, and they had no fun, we could say you were DMing those guys really badly.

It's all relative. Difficulty is certainly relative, and it doesn't matter if "most" groups would steamroller what you're putting out or get steamrollered by it, it matters how the group you're actually DM'ing for reacts.

But you asked about the tension between "interesting decisions" - perhaps better phrased as "meaningful decisions" or "decisions with consequences" and "Wish Fulfillment", which is perhaps better phrased as "emotionally meaningful success". I think one issue that the more you lean towards aspects like puzzle-solving, resource management, strategy and tactics and so on, which are inevitably going to get pretty metagame-y, the harder it becomes to stay in a strong role-playing, in-character mode. I've particularly seen some of the sort of "fiddly word puzzle"-type stuff push players completely away from their PCs and into an entirely different mode. That's not necessarily a problem, but it's definitely a thing. Whereas the stuff attributed towards the latter state, whatever we're calling it, all tends to support staying in-character.

There's also the simple matter of whether you want the game to be dramatic or you want it to be quiet. I mean, you associate "enemies destroyed spectacularly" with the "emotionally meaningful success" mode, but I'd associate it more with the "dramatic" mode. For example, 4E tends to offer strong "meaningful decisions" play in combat, but when a major badguy dies, I'm probably going to make his death spectacular, rather than having him merely slump to the floor or whatever - but that it no way detracts from any "meaningful decisions" made that lead to his death, nor does it counter-indicate them.

Equally, I could have an entirely DM-driven game, where I basically give the victory to the PCs, but where their victory, in the end, is entirely pyhrric, and their enemies don't die spectacularly. Yet that would seem to align away from the "meaningful decisions" mode, despite also aligning away from "emotionally meaningful success".

I think the challenge for a DM is recognising what players want, how they want to play and so on, and sometimes categorization can help, but I'm not sure this categorization is necessarily helpful in that task. I feel more like Pulpisher was intent on catergorizing for the purpose of excoriation than to be helpful.

Perhaps a better breakdown would be to consider how much players like certain elements, like resource management, puzzles, and so on, and how they like to succeed (because I feel like a game where the players rarely succeed at all is probably not a very fun or sustainable game - note: having a bunch of PCs die in a "PC funnel" or the like isn't the same as not succeeding, imo). I know that in my group, we don't have many lovers of static puzzles, but equally not all the players enjoy NPCs saying that they're cool, and are far more interested in whether they've actually changed the gameworld for the better. There are so many different things to measure. Hmmmm.

One thing my group can't live without, though, is NPCs with personality who oppose them. Put them up against a faceless force and they'll be slumped with boredom before the end of the session. Throw a couple of named NPCs who are kind of dicks at them, and they'll be like a dog with a bone. No idea how to categorize that.

EDIT - You say it's important to you that your players cause their PCs to adapt and survive and so on - I think that's true for most good DMs. On the flip side, a good DM must adapt to the players he's playing with to give them a challenge that entertains and engages the group he is with, rather than merely defeating them and then being smug about it (not that you are, but I've seen it happen). If he can't, he's a failure, at least temporarily (I've failed before - but you learn and adapt).


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 24, 2014)

Henry said:


> This conversation does bring out one memory for me -  one thing I found that 4e did better than 3e or Pathfinder, and that  was a Monk I played. There is quite a lot of buzz among D&D gamers  about the uselessness of the Monk in 3.x; in 4e, my monk was an unholy  chainsaw of fury. Did I get hurt? Plenty. Did I go down to superior  opponents? Absolutely. But at no time did I feel like I wasn't  contributing to the party, or that I had to weigh every combat carefully  and count my escape exits with each one just in case - and there's  nothing wrong with that.




I've played in a campaign with a  4e monk where I did have to count my escape exits most of the time.  We  were getting seriously challenged - and due to being a speed demon my  monk was the only survivor of the final battle.  (After the other PCs  went down I said that I was out of there, took a flying leap over the  curtain wall, ran, and put on an additional burst of speed).



ExploderWizard said:


> A group going into territory that is  considered challenging for their level might actually be part of a  safari but they may sometimes be playing the role of the trophy rather  than the hunter. Having that as a posiibility and not knowing when that  may be the case, is where the excitement comes from.




This isn't them playing the role of trophy.  It's that sometimes the hunted hunt back.  Occasionally the hunters get killed.



Emerikol said:


> I don't want to disagree with you 100% because I  realize the DM is representing the laws of the universe so knowing  those laws of course improves your chances of success.  I get the  feeling from you though that you mean it in a far more pejorative way.   Kind of like the DM has these oddball idiosyncrasies or is predictable  or something like that.  If I'm reading you wrong please  explain.




Saying that all DMs are at least partially  predictable and have their own idiosyncracies is not intended to be  perjorative.  All DMs are people.  Tomb of Horrors is a particularly  good example - there's a procedural method to get you through the tomb  safely, but if you don't know it then the Tomb isboth lethal and paranoia inducing.



> I vary things a lot in my dungeons so they are definitely not predictable.




And  Agatha Christie varied things a lot in her books.  Which didn't prevent  them all being Agatha Christie Mysteries with a fairly distinctive  style.



> Hard is not 3 in 10 chance of death instead of 1 in 10 chance of death.




No.   But when your chance of death doesn't go back up it's become easy by  those standards - assuming death is how you measure failure.

To  use an example, I've already mentioned American Ninja Warrior.  The  first round qualifier is hard.  Hard enough that there is no way I could  do it in this lifetime.  Hard enough that if an expert slips they  tumble out (I believe Brent Steffenson did this year).  But it's also of  fixed difficulty and there are a lot of difficulty steps between the  qualifier and the final rounds.  I know my 4e games are harder than  average - but I've also quite deliberately had to teach the players in  one of my groups to do such things as focus fire.  (Burning monsters  that take half damage until you douse their flames for a round, and a  couple of elemental icicles as weapons are _really_ good for this).


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## Hussar (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I don't necessarily think that chance of death is an indicator in general of overall difficulty.
> 
> If I had to dig a grave in the hot sun it would be hard but I'm certain of success.  Now that is a physical challenge I realize but there are mental challenges that are similar.
> 
> ...




But, in your own words, there is no chance of failure here.  You cannot fail to dig a grave.  You apparently have never had a professional challenge that you couldn't overcome.   Sure, it might have taken you some time to come to a solution, but, in every case you succeeded.

In a D&D game, I'd pretty much say that this is illusionism.  If every problem has a solution, so long as I spend enough time on it, then there is no real challenge.   It doesn't matter what decisions you make, because, so long as you keep at it, you'll succeed.  This is the definition, to me at least, of wish fulfilment gaming.  I cannot fail.  There is no failure, according to what you've just said here.  Sure, it might take a while to get there, but, the point is, you will "never in the end fail to solve the problem".  

I was using lethality as a yardstick because its an easy one.  But, since you yourself freely admit that you can never fail, then this is pretty much textbook wish fulfilment play.  

I think you've actually proven the opposite of what you set out to show.  Your game, by your own description, are wish fulfilment games.  Without the possibility of ultimately failing, it's pure wish fulfilment.  Decision points mean that you can actually make the wrong decision and ultimately fail to achieve goals.  That's the point of that style of play.


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## Emerikol (Jul 24, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> What we can say is, if your players are having a good time, and enjoy the tension that feel, feel like they are working hard, and enjoy that, and so on, then you're DMing them well.



Yes.  I agree that hard is relative.  When I say hard, I mean two things.  I believe hard for the average group of D&D players.  So it's objectively hard on some scale like that.   I also believe that it is hard for my players.   The latter is though all that really matters.   

The point is that some groups desire to be challenged in ways that other groups do not.  You could substitute player for group in that previous sentence and be right but typically they group up.  That is my point.   Not everyone wants to be highly challenged.  That does not mean they don't have combats where on occasion they might die.  Like I've said before, and you agreed, probability of death is not necessarily an indicator of difficulty.  

I feel the wish fulfillment crowd want to be heroes.  They have a conception of what that is and they want to be that.  That is their goal.  Their goal is not necessarily to be challenged or hindered from attaining that goal.  Whereas other people specifically want the challenge and are giving lip service to the fact they want to be heroes.   I hope you can see this distinction.   Of course there are degrees of interest in both.  Even the player who I identified as a wish fulfiller kind of player would not say he wants everything to be totally easy where you don't even need to roll the dice.  He wants to feel of challenge absolutely.  He doesn't want real challenge though.  Again I hope you see this distinction.



Ruin Explorer said:


> Equally, if you took another group, and just TPK'd them repeatedly, and they had no fun, we could say you were DMing those guys really badly.



There is not doubt that if I had a totally new group I would go easy on them.  I would though over time likely lead them into a challenge style game.  They'd learn from their mistakes and adjust and eventually be very skilled players.  Or they'd dislike the tenor of the game and move on to greener pastures.  But sure at first level with totally new players, challenge is very easy to achieve and it doesn't have to be hard at all by the standards of an experienced group.  So when it comes to challenge I am agreeing that it is group specific.  




Ruin Explorer said:


> It's all relative. Difficulty is certainly relative, and it doesn't matter if "most" groups would steamroller what you're putting out or get steamrollered by it, it matters how the group you're actually DM'ing for reacts.



I agree with this totally.  I also believe that you could if you cared and I think we don't establish some objective criteria.  Take a thousand groups measure their success levels and time to completion and then determine this adventure was harder or easier.   Again I don't think either of us care.  I probably shared too much about my own campaign.  I'm not advocating for DMs to steam roller their groups.  I am advocating that we realize that some groups want to feel like they really spent every ounce of their mental energy figuring out a way to survive the dungeon and others do not.   That is the overall point.




Ruin Explorer said:


> But you asked about the tension between "interesting decisions" - perhaps better phrased as "meaningful decisions" or "decisions with consequences" and "Wish Fulfillment", which is perhaps better phrased as "emotionally meaningful success". I think one issue that the more you lean towards aspects like puzzle-solving, resource management, strategy and tactics and so on, which are inevitably going to get pretty metagame-y, the harder it becomes to stay in a strong role-playing, in-character mode. I've particularly seen some of the sort of "fiddly word puzzle"-type stuff push players completely away from their PCs and into an entirely different mode. That's not necessarily a problem, but it's definitely a thing. Whereas the stuff attributed towards the latter state, whatever we're calling it, all tends to support staying in-character.



While I am a strong believer in actor stance roleplaying when it comes to my own enjoyment and immersion, I don't really think that bears on this discussion all that much.  This debate is orthogonal to that debate.  There is no correlation.




Ruin Explorer said:


> There's also the simple matter of whether you want the game to be dramatic or you want it to be quiet. I mean, you associate "enemies destroyed spectacularly" with the "emotionally meaningful success" mode, but I'd associate it more with the "dramatic" mode. For example, 4E tends to offer strong "meaningful decisions" play in combat, but when a major badguy dies, I'm probably going to make his death spectacular, rather than having him merely slump to the floor or whatever - but that it no way detracts from any "meaningful decisions" made that lead to his death, nor does it counter-indicate them.



I think you are getting off the beaten path here.  I'm sure it's that my examples are not great.  



Ruin Explorer said:


> I think the challenge for a DM is recognising what players want, how they want to play and so on, and sometimes categorization can help, but I'm not sure this categorization is necessarily helpful in that task. I feel more like Pulpisher was intent on catergorizing for the purpose of excoriation than to be helpful.




I think this whole debate could be about degree of challenge.  How hard as in mentally taxing do you want play to be?  There are some players that want to be taxed to the utmost because that is what the game is about.  Others want a lesser degree of challenge because they primarily derive pleasure from the being their characters rather than facing hard challenges.  Does that mean they want no challenge?  No.  Nobody wants zero challenge or at least almost nobody.  

Here are two gaming experiences.  They are both hyper extreme to make a point.  Please do not take from these examples that I'm saying either approach in D&D would go this far.  It's just to help understand the general concept.

The Hard Game
I once played a Ghost Recon game where I literally real time had to crawl across a field pausing as guards passed in the distance until I reached a point where I could use a sniper rifle to take out the enemy.  That crawl perhaps took 15 minutes of real time.  After I took out that guard I had to crawl some more to get another shot.  I had to systematically eliminate guards in a couple different guard towers.   It required great care and one wrong mistake meant the enemy was alerted and the game was over.  In this version of Ghost Recon, one shot often took you out.  It was far closer to real life than most games.  It was hard and at times someone watching me might have said it looked tedious.  I did enjoy it.  

The Easier Game
Call of Duty.  I'm a soldier I have a really cool gun and I can run through an enemy position taking out bad guys left and right.  Sure I can die if I totally ignore trouble but most of the fun is being this awesome killing machine.  Watching those nazi's go down left at right as I blaze my machine gun.  I get a thrill from what I am doing even though the challenge is not really there.  Even if someone shoots me, I just duck around a corner for a second and I recover.  The game is absolutely focused on wish fulfillment.  I enjoyed this game too.

Now I like both games.  If the easier game is a 1 and the hard game is a 10 on the challenge scale then I prefer a D&D game in the 7 range.  I see some people liking D&D in the 3 or 4 range.   No way is wrong.  What is fun for you is all that really matters.  Most game systems can support both styles of play well enough.  It's all a DM thing.  I think as a DM though it is good advice to identify how much challenge your players want to deal with.  I'd never tell them I'm dialing the challenge up or down (challenge for them mind you) because part of the wish fulfillment is the illusion of challenge.  Personally I don't want to run a long running campaign in the low challenge way so I seek players of like mind.


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## Emerikol (Jul 24, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, in your own words, there is no chance of failure here.  You cannot fail to dig a grave.  You apparently have never had a professional challenge that you couldn't overcome.   Sure, it might have taken you some time to come to a solution, but, in every case you succeeded.
> 
> In a D&D game, I'd pretty much say that this is illusionism.  If every problem has a solution, so long as I spend enough time on it, then there is no real challenge.   It doesn't matter what decisions you make, because, so long as you keep at it, you'll succeed.  This is the definition, to me at least, of wish fulfilment gaming.  I cannot fail.  There is no failure, according to what you've just said here.  Sure, it might take a while to get there, but, the point is, you will "never in the end fail to solve the problem".
> 
> ...




The assertion was made that you can't have something be hard without a chance of death so I did a reducto ab absurdum argument to show otherwise.  I am not saying that my games have 0% chance of death.  They definitely have a chance for sure.  I'm just saying that the occurrence of death is no indicator of how hard a game is or isn't.   I suppose with a large enough control group you might be able to say that as it applies to that entire group.  

Think about this...  (Now realize when I say hard I mean challenging the players)

Two games.
1.  Expert Group (say a 8 out of 10 in skill) is playing a hard dungeon (say a 7 out of 10 in skill)
2.  Average group (say a 5 out of 10 in skill) is playing a average dungeon (say a 5 out of 10 in skill)

Now given that state of affairs the dungeon in #1 is still harder even though it is likely more deaths would occur in group #2.

RuinExplorer rightly pointed out that this is irrelevant for this debate so I want belabor it any further because he is right.  I just wanted you to realize how I viewed the concept of hard.  See my response to him for further discussion about the actual subject.


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## Hussar (Jul 24, 2014)

But, Emerikol - your Ghost Recon example tallies perfectly with what I was talking about for lethality.  Why is Ghost Recon hard?  Because a single mistake results in total failure.  You cannot make any mistakes.  Call of Duty is softer and allows for mistakes.

But, that doesn't jive with your point though - that the PC's cannot actually fail.  After all, if you are playing a 20 level campaign, where mistakes result in total failure, then the law of averages says that your group has to have total failures often.  Even if the chance of total failure is only 10%, because of the amount of play you are talking about, then total failure is still pretty much guaranteed.

My point is, you aren't actually running a Ghost Recon game.  You cannot be because you don't fail often enough.  In your Ghost Recon play, do you ever fail?  Or do you do each mission perfectly the first time, every time?  In a video game, you can fail, because all that means is you try again.  In an RPG, total failure means that you have totally failed, there are no retries.

If there are retries, then your game isn't actually Ghost Recon but is far closer to Call of Duty.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> Here are two gaming experiences.  They are both hyper extreme to make a point.  Please do not take from these examples that I'm saying either approach in D&D would go this far.  It's just to help understand the general concept.
> 
> The Hard Game
> I once played a Ghost Recon game where I literally real time had to crawl across a field pausing as guards passed in the distance until I reached a point where I could use a sniper rifle to take out the enemy.  That crawl perhaps took 15 minutes of real time.  After I took out that guard I had to crawl some more to get another shot.  I had to systematically eliminate guards in a couple different guard towers.   It required great care and one wrong mistake meant the enemy was alerted and the game was over.  In this version of Ghost Recon, one shot often took you out.  It was far closer to real life than most games.  It was hard and at times someone watching me might have said it looked tedious.  I did enjoy it.
> ...




Having played both, I can say that you're confusing two issues, badly.

Ghost Recon is NOT a hard game (assuming the 2001 original). I have played it. It is a METHODICAL game. Follow the method and it is easy.

CoD is NOT a hard game (assuming one of '00s sequels). I have played it. It is a twitch/aim game. If you are good at that, it is easy.

Now, the BASELINE difficulty on CoD in particular IS much lower. But the same isn't true of otherwise-identical games - there are other action-shooters which are super-hard. It's not the gameplay that makes it easy, it's that the basic difficulty is intentionally low for a broad audience. Likewise there are games as methodical as GR but which are pretty easy.

So I think this example serves to illustrate that playstyle isn't difficulty.


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## Emerikol (Jul 24, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, Emerikol - your Ghost Recon example tallies perfectly with what I was talking about for lethality.  Why is Ghost Recon hard?  Because a single mistake results in total failure.  You cannot make any mistakes.  Call of Duty is softer and allows for mistakes.
> 
> But, that doesn't jive with your point though - that the PC's cannot actually fail.  After all, if you are playing a 20 level campaign, where mistakes result in total failure, then the law of averages says that your group has to have total failures often.  Even if the chance of total failure is only 10%, because of the amount of play you are talking about, then total failure is still pretty much guaranteed.
> 
> ...




Yes but I didn't fail.  I can complete that mission every time now. Why? because I'm skilled.  Skill determines death not pure chance.  If a new player showed up and tried it then sure he'd die a lot until he learned how to play the game.

I didn't kill my players a lot but I gradually rewarded smart play and as they got better I gradually increased the challenge.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> The Hard Game
> I once played a Ghost Recon game where I literally real time had to  crawl across a field pausing as guards passed in the distance until I  reached a point where I could use a sniper rifle to take out the enemy.   That crawl perhaps took 15 minutes of real time.  After I took out that  guard I had to crawl some more to get another shot.  I had to  systematically eliminate guards in a couple different guard towers.   It  required great care and one wrong mistake meant the enemy was alerted  and the game was over.  In this version of Ghost Recon, one shot often  took you out.  It was far closer to real life than most games.  It was  hard and at times someone watching me might have said it looked tedious.   I did enjoy it.
> 
> The Easier Game
> ...




OK.

You are playing D&D.

1: You have Hit Points, meaning you can survive getting hit without even being slowed down.
2: Resurrection magic is a _thing _in all editions of D&D.  Even death doesn't stop you.
3: You have magic at your fingertips for many classes.  Reliable and powerful magic with no drawbacks.
4: Unless you're an AD&D Thief, your character is intended to be pretty awesome.

The choice isn't between Ghost Recon and Call of Duty.  It's between Call of Duty and _Mass Effect_.   And even on "Nightmare" Mass Effect 3 only pushes over difficulty 2 in a  very few scenes.  (And Ghost Recon is known to not be that hard -  especially because Elite is very little more of a challenge - it's  simply that the lowest difficulty setting isn't that easy).


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## Hussar (Jul 24, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> Yes but I didn't fail.  I can complete that mission every time now. Why? because I'm skilled.  Skill determines death not pure chance.  If a new player showed up and tried it then sure he'd die a lot until he learned how to play the game.
> 
> I didn't kill my players a lot but I gradually rewarded smart play and as they got better I gradually increased the challenge.




But that only applies if the challenge is the same every time.  yes, you can complete that mission every time now.  Cool.  How many times did you fail before that became true?  And, can you complete every single mission every single time?  If I gave you a completely new mission, using the same game (I assume it has a level editor, most FpS game do), would you compete it the first time?  Unlikely, I think.

Which means that basically, you are playing wish fulfilment games.  You are gearing the difficulty to the players, with an eye on the idea that they will always succeed, just like you always succeed in your Ghost Recon mission.  There are no actual decision points to be made.  Do the same thing every time, and you succeed.  Once your players learn your "rules" they succeed every time.  They don't have any real decision points - just learn which levers you want pulled and they succeed.

Decision point gaming means that decisions actually matter.  It's not about reading the DM or always being able to make the "right" choice.  It's about every single choice actually having consequences beyond a binary succeed/fail.  In Interesting Decisions play, a decision may advance you towards a goal, or may impede you from achieving that goal but it is up to the players, ultimately, as to whether or not they will achieve success.  Success in Interesting Decisions play cannot ever be guaranteed.  As soon as success is guaranteed, then it's Wish Fulfilment play because success is a foregone conclusion.  You WILL succeed in Wish Fulfilment play.  

The thing is, you are conflating play difficulty with the idea of Interesting Decisions.  In your view, they are synonymous.  A difficult game will always be one with Interesting Decisions.  But, your examples disprove your point.  In your examples, difficult play actually has no Interesting Decisions since there are only single paths to the goal and all other paths lead to complete failure.  Since your games don't end in complete failure they can't actually have any Interesting Decisions.  If your games always end in success, then they are Wish Fulfilment by definition.  That it takes a while to get there means that you hide the illusion well, but the fact that you ALWAYS get there means that you don't actually have an Interesting Decisions game because it is virtually impossible that a group could always make the right decision every single time.  It would be like someone picking up Ghost Recon and succeeding in every single mission on the first try.  It's possible, but not very likely.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 24, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> (And Ghost Recon is known to not be that hard -  especially because Elite is very little more of a challenge - it's  simply that the lowest difficulty setting isn't that easy).




Yep and re: GR difficulty, pretty much all "methodical" games are like this. Fr'ex Deus Ex (old or HR) or Dishonored on max difficulty is barely harder than Normal, if you're playing to win/get a good score. It's the nature of methodical games - if one hit or alarm is a lose/serious score drop, there's not much difficulty curve.


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## Bluenose (Jul 24, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Yep and re: GR difficulty, pretty much all "methodical" games are like this. Fr'ex Deus Ex (old or HR) or Dishonored on max difficulty is barely harder than Normal, if you're playing to win/get a good score. It's the nature of methodical games - if one hit or alarm is a lose/serious score drop, there's not much difficulty curve.




It's also rather rare that you roll a 1 when making your stealth check. There are computer games with that sort of randomness; some of them are great fun. But they're not "skill based" and a lot of players hate them *because *of that randomness, which is a key part of task resolution in D&D and in nearly all tabletop RPGs.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 24, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I think your discussion of how "hard" your game, is and how "skilled" your players are is distracting you from the actual topics you set out to discuss. The thing is, it's subjective/relative how skilled your players are, and how hard your games are. Very subjective. Whether there even is such a thing as player "skill", rather than merely knowing DMs or genre conventions or the like in RPGs is a matter of debate - and probably should be in another thread.



 I think it's fairly obvious that a large part of 'player skill' is how closely the players' ideas of what would be 'clever' matches the DM's ideas in areas where the game doesn't provide clear resolution mechanics.  If the players come up with a 'creative use of a spell' or a 'good strategy' and whether it works is a question the rules can't answer, it comes down to whether the players have come up with something the DM will approve of.  Predicting or manipulating your DM to get there is certainly a skill.

Another large part of 'player skill' is, obviously, system mastery, for when the game system /does/ apply.


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## Hussar (Jul 25, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> It's also rather rare that you roll a 1 when making your stealth check. There are computer games with that sort of randomness; some of them are great fun. But they're not "skill based" and a lot of players hate them *because *of that randomness, which is a key part of task resolution in D&D and in nearly all tabletop RPGs.




I think this is a very important point. If success is based heavily on random chance, which DnD is, then skill becomes more about manipulating odds. Sure you can increase your odds but you can rarely guarantee success in a "difficult" game. That's the point of it being difficult. 

Which means the pcs should fail more often in a difficult game, regardless of skill. Since you cannot reduce failure chances to zero, you simply will fail due to the law of averages. 

Imagine a DnD version of Ghost Recon where your odds of success are random. Maybe guards will spot you ten per cent of the time, randomly. Now it is impossible to beat the level every time. 

That's what interesting choice play emphasizes. The fact that you can't really control the variables.


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## Hussar (Jul 25, 2014)

Yknow, reading through Pulsiver's blog I'm struck by the idea of DnD as a Sid Meier game vs DnD as Mass Effect. 

Pulsiver's point has nothing to do with difficulty at all. It's about sandbox vs linear. 

If you reframe Emerikol's argument that way, it makes a lot more sense. At least to me. He expects pro active players who are going to drive their own destiny whereas his player is looking for a more linear game with clear signposts. 

I really think there is a miscommunication between Emerikol and his player.


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## Iosue (Jul 25, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> The original post was trying to figure something out out loud.  It was interesting, worth reading, and reaching to something useful.  The way CaW/CaS has been used since (right down to I think someone having a sig reading "I like Combat as War") has been not particularly well disguised edition warring.




Then the thing to do is address those edition warring posts when they happen, not denigrate Daztur's original post, as Tony did.



> The elephant in the room is that there's almost never such a thing as Combat as War.  A dungeon is approximately as artificial an environment as the assault course on Sasuke/American Ninja Warrior.  The PCs are well enough armed, and this is a feature, that they resemble big game hunters on a safari - yes you can mess up.  But the odds are stacked in your favour.  And minimising risk while bringing back the head of a lion is a good thing.




I'm not quite following how the rest of this paragraph follows from the first sentence.



Hussar said:


> But the math doesn't add up.  If you have a truly hard game, then there has to be a significant chance of failure.  Combat or non-combat, it doesn't matter.  If you have a 50:50 chance of success, then you will fail half the time.  If the players are succeeding virtually all the time, then your game isn't actually that hard.  It can't be.  If it was truly hard, then people would fail.  If it's possible to change the odds such that the party constantly (or nearly constantly) succeeds, then it's not really that hard.  It might be a challenge to find how to change the odds, but, the fact that the odds can be changed belies the difficulty.




I believe this is a fallacy.  Let us look at maternal mortality in childbirth.  Here in Japan, the maternal mortality rate is 6 per 100,000 live births.  One might look at this number and say, "Childbirth isn't very hard or dangerous."  But in actuality, within the lifetime of some elderly people, and indeed in other parts of the world, childbirth is the number one cause of death for women.  It is _extremely_ dangerous.  This inherent danger is not absent in Japan, it is only mitigated through a very large number of interventions that must be followed for each pregnancy.  Emerikol's players mitigate the lethality of his campaign through constant interventions, but that doesn't remove the danger itself.  Mitigating that danger is in fact the very game itself.

Or to put it another way, someone who has played Contra enough to beat it without the Konami code can make the game look very easy.  To them, in fact, it may _be_ easy.  That doesn't change its inherent difficulty.

Now, mitigating the difficulty of Emerikol's game may rely on DM-negotiation and/or in-game actions that follow conventions particular to his table, but I submit that's somewhat orthogonal to the issue of difficulty.


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## Hussar (Jul 25, 2014)

I submit that difficulty is orthogonal to the concept of the two outlined styles of play. Difficulty isn't the issue. The issue is sandbox vs linear. 

Contra is 100% wish fulfilling linear but very difficult. So long as you keep playing you will succeed. There are no interesting choices.


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## Iosue (Jul 25, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I submit that difficulty is orthogonal to the concept of the two outlined styles of play. Difficulty isn't the issue. The issue is sandbox vs linear.



I see the conversation has evolved since I conceived that post in my head and got written out.  



> Contra is 100% wish fulfilling linear but very difficult. So long as you keep playing you will succeed. There are no interesting choices.



Conceded for the moment, but the Contra example was not meant to refer to Pulsipher's design paradigm, but specifically to the fallacy "low mortality rate = low chance of death".


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## Hussar (Jul 25, 2014)

Iosue said:


> I see the conversation has evolved since I conceived that post in my head and got written out.
> 
> 
> Conceded for the moment, but the Contra example was not meant to refer to Pulsipher's design paradigm, but specifically to the fallacy "low mortality rate = low chance of death".




I completely disagree with your conclusion.  If lethality can be mitigated by the players of the game to the point where it becomes extremely rare, then the game is not terribly lethal in the first place.  IOW, if the characters are rarely dying, then there is a low chance of death in that game.  Why there is a low chance is irrelevant.  The fact that it is the players who can mitigate this to the point where the game is rarely lethal leads me to believe that the game is more about following Emerikol's lead than anything else.

But, yes, this is completely besides the point.  Pulsiver is in no way discussing difficulty in his blog post at all.  He's comparing sandbox to linear games, calling sandbox games like Sid Meier games Interesting Decision Games and linear games Wish Fulfillment games and pointing to the fact that the majority of top selling games fall into the latter category.  

And we see this in D&D as well.  Paizo has built an entire business around selling wish fulfilment (by this definition) modules to gamers.  An adventure path is exactly the same as something like Mass Effect - linear with a cool storyline.  Which rolls around to Emerikol's problems with his player.  It sounds like the player is looking for a linear game where you know what's going on, whereas Emerikol is running a more sandbox game where the players are expected to drive the game.

So, no, this is just sandbox vs linear with a funny set of glasses.  It has nothing to do with one being easy and the other being difficult.


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## Iosue (Jul 25, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I completely disagree with your conclusion.  If lethality can be mitigated by the players of the game to the point where it becomes extremely rare, then the game is not terribly lethal in the first place.




Does not follow.  Cf. Player who can beat Contra w/o Konami code vs. Contra's inherent difficulty and Japan's low maternal mortality vs. childbirth's inherent lethality.



> IOW, if the characters are rarely dying, then there is a low chance of death in that game.  Why there is a low chance is irrelevant.




Why there is a low chance is, in Emerikol's game, the _whole point_.  We can flip this around by using a different failure state other than death.  For example, in games where people prefer playing more of a heroic fantasy, or where character goals have more primacy than mitigating player death, their goals are often achieved, I daresay at a rate greater than 50/50.  That doesn't mean that characters will achieve their goals automatically without doing anything, but rather that through their actions they mitigate the chances of failure.



> The fact that it is the players who can mitigate this to the point where the game is rarely lethal leads me to believe that the game is more about following Emerikol's lead than anything else.




It is about following Emerikol's lead.  But that's neither here nor there.  The same effect can be found in games that rely on rules as mediation instead of GM mediation.  In 3e or 4e, for example, encounter difficulty can be mitigated by optimized character builds and/or tactical combinations.



> But, yes, this is completely besides the point.  Pulsiver is in no way discussing difficulty in his blog post at all.  He's comparing sandbox to linear games, calling sandbox games like Sid Meier games Interesting Decision Games and linear games Wish Fulfillment games and pointing to the fact that the majority of top selling games fall into the latter category.




I don't quite see it that way.  "Linear vs open world" is actually mentioned as a separate way to look at design.   He refers to "wish fulfillment" as "having an experience".  The experience doesn't have to be linear, it merely has to be foregrounded to a greater degree than choices.  In his paradigm, card games fall under "interesting choices" (and provide poor "experience"), yet game play is quite linear.  Specifically, he calls out D&D and RPGs as "bridging the gap".  That's because you can have interesting choices _and_ "an experience", regardless of whether you're playing a railroad or a sandbox.



> Which rolls around to Emerikol's problems with his player.  It sounds like the player is looking for a linear game where you know what's going on, whereas Emerikol is running a more sandbox game where the players are expected to drive the game.




I don't quite see how you come to that conclusion.  Emerikol says (my emphasis),


Emerikol said:


> The player I ran into basically said that he felt my game was too  challenging.  I kept the group too stressed out fighting for their  survival.  He enjoys a game that while still having combats and so forth  is not one that worries him especially.  *The fun for him is using cool  powers to do cool things.
> 
> Whereas, other players want to fight and claw their way to every goal.   The fighting and clawing though is the real goal.*  The artificial reward  goal is just symbolic of the completion of the journey.




It sounds to me that the player was seeking a different experience (Big Damn Heroes) from the rest of the group (Fantasy F'ing Vietnam) and/or sought different interesting decisions than the one Emerikol's game offered. That's entirely unrelated to sandbox vs. linear.  I will say at the same time, though, that I don't necessarily agree with Emerikol that the problem was that his game offered interesting decisions and his player wanted wish fulfillment.


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## dd.stevenson (Jul 25, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Strategic and tactical focus.



Fair enough--though I don't believe these terms are nearly as catchy (and therefore not as internet-ready) as CaS and CaW. I would agree that they're more accurate, and probably less likely to get used as cudgels in an internet fight.



Neonchameleon said:


> The original post was trying to figure something out out loud. It was interesting, worth reading, and reaching to something useful. The way CaW/CaS has been used since (right down to I think someone having a sig reading "I like Combat as War") has been not particularly well disguised edition warring.



To kick the tires a little bit, if the sig in question read: "I LIKE STRATEGIC FOCUS!!!" would that not be edition warring in your eyes?


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 25, 2014)

dd.stevenson said:


> Fair enough--though I don't believe these terms are nearly as catchy (and therefore not as internet-ready) as CaS and CaW. I would agree that they're more accurate, and probably less likely to get used as cudgels in an internet fight.
> 
> To kick the tires a little bit, if the sig in question read: "I LIKE STRATEGIC FOCUS!!!" would that not be edition warring in your eyes?




There's no implied "You namby pamby pantywaist kids are only playing a sport while we real men are going to War!"  Strategic and tactical focus are like other in a way war and sport aren't.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 25, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> There's no implied "You namby pamby pantywaist kids are only playing a sport while we real men are going to War!"  Strategic and tactical focus are like other in a way war and sport aren't.




The thing is, if you leave out the inferred condescension, calling it "sport" - to my mind - very accurately describes the concept of deliberately creating rules and restrictions for balanced play.  The difference between learning to kill with a sword, and learning to compete in fencing tournaments.  I don't feel that "strategic vs. tactical" communicates the same idea.

In a sense, a massive wargame of moving armies around a map (Axis & Allies?) is just as "sport" in this context as fencing.


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## dd.stevenson (Jul 26, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> There's no implied "You namby pamby pantywaist kids are only playing a sport while we real men are going to War!"  Strategic and tactical focus are like other in a way war and sport aren't.



That's completely fair. I dislike "crunch" and "fluff" for more or less the same reason.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 26, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> The thing is, if you leave out the inferred condescension, calling it "sport" - to my mind - very accurately describes the concept of deliberately creating rules and restrictions for balanced play.  The difference between learning to kill with a sword, and learning to compete in fencing tournaments.  I don't feel that "strategic vs. tactical" communicates the same idea.
> 
> In a sense, a massive wargame of moving armies around a map (Axis & Allies?) is just as "sport" in this context as fencing.




The thing is that sport is accurate.  _War_ isn't.  So-called Combat as War is a cross between a big game safari and an obstacle course.  With a little shooting back - but there's shooting back in CaS.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 26, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> The thing is that sport is accurate.  _War_ isn't.  So-called Combat as War is a cross between a big game safari and an obstacle course.  With a little shooting back - but there's shooting back in CaS.




I'm having trouble coming up with a simple metaphor to argue with this.  Best I've got is - the intent of CaW would be more akin to a big game safari/obstacle course where the hunters can decide that burning down the jungle might be the best option.


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## billd91 (Jul 26, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> The thing is that sport is accurate.  _War_ isn't.  So-called Combat as War is a cross between a big game safari and an obstacle course.  With a little shooting back - but there's shooting back in CaS.




Well, that's the difference between treating a conflict as war and as sport. In war, you *want* to minimize the shots coming at you. The perfect battle is one in which you win but aren't shot at at all. And if you have to use unsportsmanlike methods or overwhelming force to achieve that, so what?


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 26, 2014)

billd91 said:


> Well, that's the difference between treating a conflict as war and as sport. In war, you *want* to minimize the shots coming at you. The perfect battle is one in which you win but aren't shot at at all. And if you have to use unsportsmanlike methods or overwhelming force to achieve that, so what?




Which makes it different from a sport _how?_  Sport is not about giving the other side a sporting chance.  It's about testing yourself and your team.  And the professional foul is a part of sport.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 26, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Which makes it different from a sport _how?_  Sport is not about giving the other side a sporting chance.  It's about testing yourself and your team.  And the professional foul is a part of sport.




Sport is too about giving the other side a sporting chance.  I can't put another 15 guys on my side, and I'm not allowed to beat you up in the locker room.


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## dd.stevenson (Jul 26, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I'm having trouble coming up with a simple metaphor to argue with this.  Best I've got is - the intent of CaW would be more akin to a big game safari/obstacle course where the hunters can decide that burning down the jungle might be the best option.



Combat as _Conquista_


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 26, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Sport is too about giving the other side a sporting chance.  I can't put another 15 guys on my side,




In short sport has a GM and rules.  That doesn't mean that within the rules (i.e. the rules of the RPG and the setting rules) you don't try to crush the opposition.



> and I'm not allowed to beat you up in the locker room.




So Combat as War is in fact Professional Wrestling with only a _little_ less Kayfabe?  OK, so I'm being _slightly_ flippant there.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 26, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> In short sport has a GM and rules.  That doesn't mean that within the rules (i.e. the rules of the RPG and the setting rules) you don't try to crush the opposition.




Well, that's not really what I'm saying - but I suspect we're too far on diverting the thread anyway.


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## Libramarian (Jul 27, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I don't see how soccer could be described as CaW - since your team doesn't have the option of, say, ambushing the opposing team at Hooters the night before and beating the stuffing out of them.  Or hiring fans in the stadium to take potshots at the goalie.




What I'm getting at is that the difference between these two types of games is not really about the associated fiction of the game moves. That's a red herring I think. It's about how transparent the consequences are for the decisions players make.

One can imagine Combat-as-Sport _about_ ambushing the other team and hiring fans to take potshots. This is what refluffing powers and/or using pg 42 in 4e is like. You can describe your move however you like, but it's still Combat-as-Sport because you know what the consequences are going to be. There's no "going with your gut" involved.

A game with less predictable consequences tends to snowball into dramatic showdowns, like scoring chances in soccer, showdowns in poker, or save-or-dies in D&D. Some people really like this, and some people deride this as 20 minutes of fun in 4 hours, which I can understand. (I think you can fine-tune things to maybe 10 minutes of fun every hour, but you're still going to have the same basic rollercoaster dynamic).

Coming up with crazy schemes (eg [MENTION=55680]Daztur[/MENTION]'s example from the original thread with the bees) is definitely fun when it works, but not so much when your plan tumbles like a house of cards because of something you didn't expect. Whether or not you like this depends on whether the fun outweighs the frustration.

I think a great test for whether or not one would like classic D&D is how they feel about poker (I would say soccer but the poor physical fitness of the typical gamer is going to be a massive confounding factor there). Classic D&D is really a lot like talky fantasy poker. It's a gambling game where you nudge the odds in your favor by convincing other people to imagine things the way you're imagining them. I find this very entertaining (especially as DM) but I don't think it's a "perfect" game; I can understand not liking it.

As for how this ties into Interesting Decisions vs. Wish Fulfilment, I do think there is a connection. In CaS game you can play in more of a Wish Fulfillment mindset because you're not risking as much at each decision. You can take plays off to goof around, as it were. In a CaW there's a lot more pressure to be in win-at-all-costs mode all the time, because you don't want to be the person who drops the ball when it turns out that that decision was actually extremely important.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 27, 2014)

Libramarian said:


> What I'm getting at is that the difference between these two types of games is not really about the associated fiction of the game moves. That's a red herring I think. It's about how transparent the consequences are for the decisions players make.




I don't know that I feel that your post is really about CaW/CaS as I see it.  But I agree that your post, in itself, is a very interesting point.


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## Hussar (Jul 28, 2014)

Libramarian said:


> /snip
> 
> A game with less predictable consequences *tends* to snowball into dramatic showdowns, like scoring chances in soccer, showdowns in poker, or save-or-dies in D&D. Some people really like this, and some people deride this as 20 minutes of fun in 4 hours, which I can understand. (I think you can fine-tune things to maybe 10 minutes of fun every hour, but you're still going to have the same basic rollercoaster dynamic).
> 
> ...




This is where I disagree.  Unpredictable consequences might snowball into dramatic showdowns, but, because they're unpredictable, most often won't.  After all, "dramatic showdown" is just one of several scenarios and frequently not even the most likely since as soon as they become most likely, it's not longer CaW but CaS.  That's what CaS is supposed to do after all.  The fact that you point to save or die as dramatic I think points to a basic disconnect in what people consider dramatic as well.

And, as far as interesting choice play goes, save or die is the antithesis of this.  There are no interesting choices to be made with SoD.  It's pure luck.  Unless, of course, you start signposting the encounter (the medusa forgets to clean up her statuary, lots of dead bodies with horrified faces and no wounds means bodak ahead) but, then, now you're no longer CaW but CaS because you are artificially balancing the encounter.  The only reason to signpost the encounter is the presence of SoD, since we don't actually bother to signpost an encounter with, say, a manticore.


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## BryonD (Jul 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> This is where I disagree.  Unpredictable consequences might snowball into dramatic showdowns, but, because they're unpredictable, most often won't.



".. for you."  Right?  

"For me" the value added is scores of time over the negatives.   (year after year after year)


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## Hussar (Jul 28, 2014)

BryonD said:


> ".. for you."  Right?
> 
> "For me" the value added is scores of time over the negatives.   (year after year after year)




But, how does that work?

If the results are unpredictable, and the number of dramatic results are equal to non-dramatic results, then it should split half and half right?  If there are more non-dramatic results, and again, we're using an unpredictable model, then the majority of results should be non-dramatic.  

If you are consistently beating the odds, then it's no longer combat as war.  It can't be since the law of averages would have to rule, particularly year after year after year.  

And this is where the elitism that Tony V talks about comes in.  People want to believe that their game is "combat as war" because 1.  that sounds way cooler, and 2. combat as sport is more heavily aligned with certain editions and play styles that cannot possibly have anything in common with how the poster plays.

The problem is, if your game is truly combat as war, but the players win the vast majority of the time, then it's not combat as war.  It can't be.  If the group is succeeding in combat after combat, year after year, then you are playing combat as sport.  There isn't any other explanation.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, how does that work?
> 
> If the results are unpredictable, and the number of dramatic results are equal to non-dramatic results, then it should split half and half right?  If there are more non-dramatic results, and again, we're using an unpredictable model, then the majority of results should be non-dramatic.
> 
> ...




1.  I think several people on this board are looking for conflict where none was intended.  The CaW/CaS divide was a difference of playstyle - and while the original writer seemed to prefer one, he didn't claim superiority.  Just that different rules serve the different styles.

2.  If the players keep winning in an ostensible CaW game, it doesn't mean that it's not really CaW.  It means that the DM is either not as good at it as the players, or not trying hard enough to win.  That does not change the nature of the playstyle difference.

3.  If you don't like the CaW/CaS concept, fine.  Don't use it, and you're even free to say you dislike it when it comes up.  But please don't try to define the concepts with your negative spin for people who are asking about it.  It's as bad as, say, a FARK politics thread.


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## pemerton (Jul 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> If you have a truly hard game, then there has to be a significant chance of failure.  Combat or non-combat, it doesn't matter.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> If it's possible to change the odds such that the party constantly (or nearly constantly) succeeds, then it's not really that hard.  It might be a challenge to find how to change the odds, but, the fact that the odds can be changed belies the difficulty.



Here are some phrases which, for message board purposes, can be treated as synonymous: "is hard"; "is a challenge"; "is difficult".

Relying on that synonymy, I now restate the quote:

If you have a truly hard game, then there has to be a significant chance of failure. If it's possible to change the ods, then it's not really that hard. It might be hard to find how to change the odds, but the fact that the odds can be changed belies the hardness.​
I hope that this restatement reveals what has gone wrong: if it is _hard _to change the odds, then in fact the game was _hard_, even if the upshot is that the odds were changed and hence the final, modified, risk of failure was low.

 [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION] gave work examples; I can give some too. When I have to get something written by a deadline, I rarely fail - writing to a deadline is part of my job. But that doesn't mean it can't be hard - it's just that I put in the effort, an am quite good at it. You might retort, "OK, then, it's not hard for you" - but now we're just playing with ambiguities in the meaning of "hard. Eg it's not hard in the sense that I'm likely to fail, but it certainly is hard in the sense that I might be exhausted by the end of it.



Hussar said:


> If lethality can be mitigated by the players of the game to the point where it becomes extremely rare, then the game is not terribly lethal in the first place.





Hussar said:


> In a D&D game, I'd pretty much say that this is illusionism.  If every problem has a solution, so long as I spend enough time on it, then there is no real challenge.



I think this is obviously untrue. I mean, every sudoku or crossword has a solution, but that doesn't mean that no puzzle of that sort is ever a real challenge. It's a long time since I took a maths or logic exam, but every question on those exams had a solution too, a solution that I was in principle capable of identifying and applying. It doesn't mean that none of them was hard.

Or to give a real-world example: the threat to mercant shipping of submarine warfare was able to be mitigated via the convoy system, plus other innovations in naval practices and technology. That doesn't mean that the threat posed by submarines was an illusion!



Emerikol said:


> If I had to dig a grave in the hot sun it would be hard but I'm certain of success.  Now that is a physical challenge I realize but there are mental challenges that are similar.
> 
> In my games failure to play well results in death.  Over the years, my players have learned to play well.
> 
> ...





Emerikol said:


> I think we all have to agree that combat tactics are combat tactics and good ways to move through a dungeon could be established.  It gets challenging when the unexpected happens and you have to think on your feet.  The whole point is that hard does not equate to death.  Hard is not 3 in 10 chance of death instead of 1 in 10 chance of death.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> A game where you entered a room and rolled a die ten and on a 2 or better you clear the room is no easier than a game where you have to get a 5 or better.  Perhaps it's harder to not die but it's not hard as in requiring skill.   That is the kind of hard I'm talking about.  Not improbability of success.



This makes sense to me.



Iosue said:


> Emerikol's players mitigate the lethality of his campaign through constant interventions, but that doesn't remove the danger itself.  Mitigating that danger is in fact the very game itself.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Now, mitigating the difficulty of Emerikol's game may rely on DM-negotiation and/or in-game actions that follow conventions particular to his table, but I submit that's somewhat orthogonal to the issue of difficulty.



So does this.



Hussar said:


> I submit that difficulty is orthogonal to the concept of the two outlined styles of play. Difficulty isn't the issue. The issue is sandbox vs linear.





Hussar said:


> Pulsiver's point has nothing to do with difficulty at all. It's about sandbox vs linear.





Iosue said:


> I don't quite see it that way.  "Linear vs open world" is actually mentioned as a separate way to look at design.   He refers to "wish fulfillment" as "having an experience".  The experience doesn't have to be linear, it merely has to be foregrounded to a greater degree than choices.



As I posted a way upthread, I agree that it's not about difficulty. Nor is it about linear/sandbox. It's about "choice" vs "experience". In RPGing, the examplar of "wish fulfillent" is not really what Emerikol pulled out in the OP. It's first person immersive RPing. I think of CoC as the poster-child for this, but I think a lot of the more "avant garde" 2nd ed stuff (Ravenloft, Planescape) was intended to be played this way too.



Libramarian said:


> What I'm getting at is that the difference between these two types of games is not really about the associated fiction of the game moves. That's a red herring I think. It's about how transparent the consequences are for the decisions players make.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



I like your analysis. I don't know that I agree with the connection to WF, though - goofing off isn't necessarily about "having an experience". I think it can often be about "authorship", about achieving some communicative effect in the real world. (Eg making a point about your PC, or about someone else's, or making a point about what is at stake.)


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## Bluenose (Jul 28, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> 2.  If the players keep winning in an ostensible CaW game, it doesn't mean that it's not really CaW.  It means that the DM is either not as good at it as the players, or not trying hard enough to win.  That does not change the nature of the playstyle difference.




If the GM is trying hard enough to win, then they'll win. Period. Unless people are going to argue that the GM can cheat and Rule 0 shouldn't count when you don't want it to, then they can always throw more enemies in, add waves of reinforcements, that didn't exist before the players planning. Since they don't I think it becomes pretty obvious that in the CaW playstyle the GM generally has to play a different way and can't use all their resources against the players.


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## Iosue (Jul 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> And this is where the elitism that Tony V talks about comes in.  People want to believe that their game is "combat as war" because 1.  that sounds way cooler, and 2. combat as sport is more heavily aligned with certain editions and play styles that cannot possibly have anything in common with how the poster plays.
> 
> The problem is, if your game is truly combat as war, but the players win the vast majority of the time, then it's not combat as war.  It can't be.  If the group is succeeding in combat after combat, year after year, then you are playing combat as sport.  There isn't any other explanation.




Look, here's the primary difference between Combat as War vs Combat as Sport, at least as Daztur suggested (I make no claim about how edition warriors may have abused it).  Do you find lots of short, one-sided curbstomp battles appealing?  If so, you like Combat as War.  Do you find a succession of one-sided curbstomp battles boring, and prefer battles with a little more granularity, a little give and take?  If so, you like Combat as Sport.  I mean, it's right there in the post that linked to earlier in the thread.  There's nothing there about combat as war being a statistically accurate representation of battles in war.  It all comes down to do you want your combat to be like the fencing matching Princess Bride, or like Indy shooting the swordsman in Raiders?  



pemerton said:


> Here are some phrases which, for message board purposes, can be treated as synonymous: "is hard"; "is a challenge"; "is difficult".
> 
> Relying on that synonymy, I now restate the quote:
> If you have a truly hard game, then there has to be a significant chance of failure. If it's possible to change the odds, then it's not really that hard. It might be hard to find how to change the odds, but the fact that the odds can be changed belies the hardness.​
> ...




I agree with much of this.  I think the common mistake is to equate difficulty with chance of character death.  Death is just another journey, one we all mus-- no, wait, that's Gandalf.  Death is just one of many failure states.  The stakes don't have to be about life or death.  They could be about quest goals, story goals, or personal character goals.  Once looked in this way, I think a lot of the differences fall away.  In a B/X game, for example, the goals of my game may be "stay alive and find the riches."  While the goals in pemerton's game might be, "Avenge my father, and reclaim my homeland," in addition to other character goals.  Our games may look very different, but as DM's are jobs are highly similar: we put obstacles in the way of the character's goals.  Failure outcomes may be diverse -- death or failure to get loot in my campaign; letting the enemy get away, or having to run and live to fight another day in pemerton's.  But the players will constantly work to prevent those failure states, so out and out failure is likely to be rare.



> As I posted a way upthread, I agree that it's not about difficulty. Nor is it about linear/sandbox. It's about "choice" vs "experience". In RPGing, the examplar of "wish fulfillent" is not really what Emerikol pulled out in the OP. It's first person immersive RPing. I think of CoC as the poster-child for this, but I think a lot of the more "avant garde" 2nd ed stuff (Ravenloft, Planescape) was intended to be played this way too.




I'd say just "immersive" rather than limiting it to "first person".  The experience can come vicariously.  A player playing his paladin may constantly say, "My character says this," or "My paladin does that," but if he thrills at his paladin's successes and feels disappointment in his failures, the player is having an experience.  This is contrast to, say, M:tG, where if a player loses they don't _generally_ say, "Noooo!  My planeswalker was vanquished!"

It cannot be stressed enough that Pulsipher, as near as I can tell, did not intend for RPGs to fall into either side of the dichotomy, but rather to be a bridge between them.  A particular game or a particular table may lean one way or the other, but even so there is no RPG that doesn't provide both interesting choices _and_ wish fulfillment/an experience.  In essence, that was the innovation of RPGs -- to combine the interesting choices of a wargame with the wish fulfillment of being a character in a fictional world.  So with RPGs the question is never "Is our game about interesting choices or wish fulfillment?"  The questions are "What interesting choices does our game offer, and what kind of wish fulfillment do we want to experience?"


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## pemerton (Jul 28, 2014)

Iosue said:


> I'd say just "immersive" rather than limiting it to "first person".  The experience can come vicariously.  A player playing his paladin may constantly say, "My character says this," or "My paladin does that," but if he thrills at his paladin's successes and feels disappointment in his failures, the player is having an experience.



Sure. By "first person immersion" I wasn't meaning to preclude 3rd person action declaration, but rather to capture the _character identification_ that is (as you say) central to RPGs in a way it's not to (say) M:tG.



Iosue said:


> It cannot be stressed enough that Pulsipher, as near as I can tell, did not intend for RPGs to fall into either side of the dichotomy, but rather to be a bridge between them.  A particular game or a particular table may lean one way or the other, but even so there is no RPG that doesn't provide both interesting choices _and_ wish fulfillment/an experience.  In essence, that was the innovation of RPGs -- to combine the interesting choices of a wargame with the wish fulfillment of being a character in a fictional world.



I think this point is very similar to Ron Edwards' point that all RPGs involve exploration of a shared imaginary space. But different tables are interested in, and different systems offer varying support for, various ways of approaching and/or building on that exploration.

I think some approaches to RPGing come very close to eschewing choices on the player side, other perhaps than certain choices about characterisation. I think these come closest to the WF side of the dichotomy.



Hussar said:


> Paizo has built an entire business around selling wish fulfilment (by this definition) modules to gamers.  An adventure path is exactly the same as something like Mass Effect - linear with a cool storyline.



I certainly think there is something to this. It seems to me that APs must at least put some outer limits on player choices (eg in the typical AP the basic opposition and BBEG is pre-determined, as are many of the key situations that the campaign will involve). In that sense what is on offer _is_ primarily an experience, I think.


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## pemerton (Jul 28, 2014)

Iosue said:


> This is contrast to, say, M:tG, where if a player loses they don't _generally_ say, "Noooo!  My planeswalker was vanquished!"



But henceforth they should!


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## BryonD (Jul 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, how does that work?



We have long ago established that I lack the eloquence to turn this light bulb on for you.

A very important part ties into awareness of what is and is not random and uncontrollable.  Finding ways to mitigate risks, manage circumstances, etc.  If you are looking at the elements in a vacuum you don't see the possibilities correctly.

But the real point remains, you are declaring because your games have worked one way that everyone else must experience the same thing.  When a vast number of people have a good experience that you claim can't happen, perhaps you can find more fun can let go of your presumptions.


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## Sadras (Jul 28, 2014)

BryonD said:


> "For me" the value added is scores of time over the negatives.   (year after year after year)




Just to clarify are you speaking of PC/Party failures or Dramatic Showdowns that never materialise?


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## BryonD (Jul 28, 2014)

Sadras said:


> Just to clarify are you speaking of PC/Party failures or Dramatic Showdowns that never materialise?




I'm talking about PC/Party failures that were very fun to all involved because of the way they played out.
I'm talking about Dramatic Showdowns where the party realized they had made a mistake and now had to figure their way out of it.
I'm talking about PC/Party successes because they managed to stack the odds in their favor.
I'm talking about PC/Party successes when they got insanely lucky and it was awesome.
I'm talking about PC/Party success that came after PC/Party failures and the sense of revenge was awesome.


You didn't say much, so I can't take much context.  But you seem to be back to implying the inevitability of circumstances based on looking at mechanics in a vacuum.  I not only reject that presumption but I'm saying that my decades on gaming experience disprove the null hypothesis claiming my game can't happen.  That isn't to say that other peoples' game with negative results don't happen. But I'm not going to get hung up on worrying about if someone else has a game that is defined by failures and dramatic events that did not materialize.


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## BryonD (Jul 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, how does that work?



To repeat my question: Is your statement intended to be "to you", or are you claiming to describe an unavoidable truth for all games everywhere?


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 28, 2014)

BryonD said:


> You didn't say much, so I can't take much context.  But you seem to be back to implying the inevitability of circumstances based on looking at mechanics in a vacuum.  I not only reject that presumption but I'm saying that my decades on gaming experience disprove the null hypothesis claiming my game can't happen.  That isn't to say that other peoples' game with negative results don't happen. But I'm not going to get hung up on worrying about if someone else has a game that is defined by failures and dramatic events that did not materialize.




You seem to be working very hard to avoid talking about what _can_, potentially, _on the outside_, happen, whilst avoiding acknowledging what the mechanics might make likely. I'm not following closely but, just because something can, technically, happen, just because you've seen it happen, doesn't mean it's very likely in the mechanics.

You say "I'm not going to get hung up on...", and that's nice for you, but if that's a common result of using a system RAW or the like, that's certainly an issue that should be acknowledged, and airily dismissing it, as you really appear to be doing, doesn't really contribute anything.

Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick, though.


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## Hussar (Jul 28, 2014)

I look at it this way.

If a group is consistently beating the odds, on a consistent basis, then the odds are not what they think they are.  They cannot be.  

The example of poker is pretty apt I think.  Sure, you can play the odds in poker.  You can do all sorts of things to help you win.  But, what you cannot ever do, is consistently win.  You can't.  There's simply too much random element in poker to ever win consistently.  The longer you play, the more you will lose, and that's an unavoidable fact.

So, if your group is consistently succeeding in combat, then how can it be CaW?  It's not random.  It can't be.  Not if you are consistently succeeding.  The odds are simply too great for that to be true.  Even if you have an 80% success rate, you are still failing 1 encounter in 5.  And I'll guarantee that no one in this thread has a failure rate even approaching that.  Probably closer to about 1%

That's why I call it illusionism.  It has to be.  The DM is setting encounters with the idea that the encounters are not only defeat able (unless he wants the party to run away) but the presumption of everyone at the table is that the vast majority of encounters ARE winnable. You can pretend that your encounters are as difficult as you want, but, at the end of the day, most of them really aren't.  They can't be.  If they really were, then you'd be killing PC's more often than you do.

That's why I asked Emerikol way back how often he whacked PC's in combat.  A question that got completely dodged by claiming that difficulty isn't just combat.  Thing is, in D&D, failure in combat is generally a dead PC.  It's pretty rare that you fail and no one dies.  I'll stand by the idea that if you're playing a D&D campaign from level 1 to 20 and the PC's succeed more than 80%, then you're pretty much tailoring every encounter to the group.  There's no other way it works because the odds are just too great.  

The odds in most groups is likely somewhere around 95% for every single encounter.  I doubt any of you see your groups fail more than 1 in 20 encounters, either combat or non-combat.  1 in 10 at the absolute outside.  Whether that's due to the DM designing encounters that way at the outset, or shifting the odds during encounters by making deliberate choices (yeah, I could coup de grace the downed fighter, but, hey, we'll swing fire over to the cleric because that would be more fun...) the odds are almost never as high as people pretend they are.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 28, 2014)

Hussar said:


> If a group is consistently beating the odds, on a consistent basis, then the odds are not what they think they are.  They cannot be.
> 
> The example of poker is pretty apt I think.  Sure, you can play the odds in poker.  You can do all sorts of things to help you win.  But, what you cannot ever do, is consistently win.  You can't.  There's simply too much random element in poker to ever win consistently.  The longer you play, the more you will lose, and that's an unavoidable fact.




I have no problem with these statements.



Hussar said:


> So, if your group is consistently succeeding in combat, then how can it be CaW?  It's not random.  It can't be.  Not if you are consistently succeeding.  The odds are simply too great for that to be true.  Even if you have an 80% success rate, you are still failing 1 encounter in 5.  And I'll guarantee that no one in this thread has a failure rate even approaching that.  Probably closer to about 1%.




And this is where you fall down - because #2 has nothing to do with #1.  Combat as War is not defined by odds or risk.  (Although I agree it seems odd for someone who likes this style of play to win all the time.)

Combat as War is a knight riding against an opposing army.  He doesn't want a fair fight, he wants to win.  He'd rather ride against the peasant militia if he has to, because they can't hurt him up there on his horse.  If he's forced to fight an opposing knight, he uses whatever tactics he thinks he can win with.

Combat as Sport is a knight riding in a joust.  He still wants to win, but in this case the circumstances are limited by mutual agreement - one knight at a time, waiting until the other guy is ready, letting the other guy pick up his weapon when he falls down.  (The fact that they're also not trying to kill each other doesn't apply to D&D.)  Both knights could still be hurt or killed.  One knight could be much better than the other, such that he has no chance of losing.  But the circumstances surrounding the fight limit the options of the fighters.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 28, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Combat as War is a knight riding against an opposing army.  He doesn't want a fair fight, he wants to win.  He'd rather ride against the peasant militia if he has to, because they can't hurt him up there on his horse.  If he's forced to fight an opposing knight, he uses whatever tactics he thinks he can win with.
> 
> Combat as Sport is a knight riding in a joust.  He still wants to win, but in this case the circumstances are limited by mutual agreement - one knight at a time, waiting until the other guy is ready, letting the other guy pick up his weapon when he falls down.  (The fact that they're also not trying to kill each other doesn't apply to D&D.)  Both knights could still be hurt or killed.  One knight could be much better than the other, such that he has no chance of losing.  But the circumstances surrounding the fight limit the options of the fighters.




By this definition, though, no edition of D&D has focused on either extreme, they've all been in a continuum in-between those.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 28, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> By this definition, though, no edition of D&D has focused on either extreme, they've all been in a continuum in-between those.




I don't see this as a problem with the model.

The reason the CaW/CaS dichotomy comes up is because certain D&D rulesets support one playstyle better or worse - and that people who prefer to play at the CaW end of the continuum found the, shall we say, "encounter-level" focus of some magical abilities to be too weak for their intentions.  While people preferring the CaS end found long duration and open-ended powers to be "game-breaking".

Ergo - when discussing a new edition, it became a point of contention as to how far to one side of the continuum the rules should fall.  Remember, most people in any argument tend to think their viewpoint represents something close to the "center".

I think that these points about different goals of playstyles is useful for understanding the game, and I get very frustrated when other writers dismiss whole arguments because they feel that the original poster was attacking their preferences.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 28, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I don't see this as a problem with the model.
> 
> The reason the CaW/CaS dichotomy comes up is because certain D&D rulesets support one playstyle better or worse - and that people who prefer to play at the CaW end of the continuum found the, shall we say, "encounter-level" focus of some magical abilities to be too weak for their intentions.  While people preferring the CaS end found long duration and open-ended powers to be "game-breaking".
> 
> ...




Well, what you're showing is that there is no dichotomy. Only a continuum, and talking about the issue as if there was a dichotomy is very clearly, as you have illustrated,_ actively unhelpful_.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 28, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Well, what you're showing is that there is no dichotomy. Only a continuum, and talking about the issue as if there was a dichotomy is very clearly, as you have illustrated,_ actively unhelpful_.




Okay, then, looking up Dichotomy to see if I'm using it incorrectly.

...

Maybe.  I think CaW and CaS are two very different styles of play, though no one would say completely opposite.  But for the purposes of this analogy, call them "black" and "white".

Just because I have defined "black" and "white" as concepts does not mean that (a) there is no continuum of shades between them, nor that (b) almost everything falls in the "shades of gray" part of the continuum.  It does mean that a lot of grays consist of more black than white, or more white than black.

If you are trying to figure out why a particular person dislikes the shade of gray you like - maybe it's because he likes more black in his gray than you do.

And I don't think it's _actively unhelpful _- I think it's trying to _define terms_, which is more productive in discussion than arguing from emotion.  If everyone agrees on the same terminology and definitions, then you can more easily discuss why the thing with the agreed-upon-definition is good or bad.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 28, 2014)

I don't have time to go into everything wrong with the false dichotomy presented by CaW/CaS and its slanted, condescending delivery.

I will pause to point out, though, that D&D is a cooperative TT game, and that both 'styles' that CaW/CaS presents as the only styles are potentially problematic when applied to such a game.

As to the justification that certain games 'support' one style or another, I'm not convinced.  Classic D&D lacked encounter guidelines, and those provided by 3.x weren't that dependable, while 4e came up with some fairly decent ones and 5e is at least trying to hold onto some of that.  That doesn't mean that any of those edition 'supported' one quasi-competitive mode of play better than another, just that later games better-supported both, in the limited sense that they decreased the degree of system mastery the DM needed to prepare encounters as intended - be they of the asymmetrical CaW type or the balanced CaS type.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 28, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I don't have time to go into everything wrong with the false dichotomy presented by CaW/CaS and its *slanted, condescending delivery*.




This is what I mean when I point out that it's not necessarily the original writer that's the one causing the hostile tone here.



Tony Vargas said:


> As to the justification that certain games 'support' one style or another, I'm not convinced.  Classic D&D lacked encounter guidelines, and those provided by 3.x weren't that dependable, while 4e came up with some fairly decent ones and 5e is at least trying to hold onto some of that.  That doesn't mean that any of those edition 'supported' one quasi-competitive mode of play better than another, just that later games better-supported both, in the limited sense that they decreased the degree of system mastery the DM needed to prepare encounters as intended - be they of the asymmetrical CaW type or the balanced CaS type.




And there's no reason you can't hold such an opinion, and defend it, while maintaining civility.  Discussions such as this one help me better understand the play experience from multiple points of view, and I don't want them to descend into anger.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 28, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> This is what I mean when I point out that it's not necessarily the original writer that's the one causing the hostile tone here.



 The presentation of CaW/CaS was condescending and slanted, whether the OP consciously intended it to be so or not.  



> And there's no reason you can't hold such an opinion, and defend it, while maintaining civility.
> Discussions such as this one help me better understand the play experience from multiple points of view, and I don't want them to descend into anger.



 Then perhaps an alternative way of expressing the idea, since CaW/CaS carries those connotations and overtones of incivility conceived in anger & resentment?

Let's try to identify the actual idea, while scrubbing it of anything of that nature:

The theory seems to be that there are exactly two, distinct, mutually incompatible ways to play D&D.  

One approaches conflict in an anything-goes manner that views rules, genre conventions, and anything else that stands between the player and victory, as things to be somehow gotten around or leveraged in that pursuit of victory.  

The other approaches in-game conflicts in the context of rules & genre conventions, and seeks to remain inside the guidelines implied by each.

If that were true, what are the implications:

What would a game have to do to allow play in first style?  Well, it doesn't really have to do much, since the player will act in defiance of anything the game lays down, be it rules, guidelines, themes, or whatever, when doing so is necessary in his view to secure success.  

What would a game have to do to allow play in the second style?  Well, it also wouldn't need much, it would just have to have clear, functional rules, and be clear on it's intended genre and themes (or lack thereof, leaving them to the GM, as the case may be).  That way players wouldn't be left guessing what the 'point' of the game was.

What could a game do to 'force' the first style of play, even on players who prefer the second?  A few things:  Excessive lethality, for instance, would cause players to focus on victory (and thus survival) over other consideration, because those other considerations can't really be addressed without a character.  Unclear or incomplete rules would force the DM to resort to frequent judgement calls, making 'gaming the DM' a needful strategy.  On the other extreme, very detailed and inflexible rules could be designed to 'reward system mastery,' again, making effectiveness trump other factors when making decisions.

What could a game do to 'force' the second style of play, even on players who prefer the second?  Not much, since players preferring the first style are willing to go outside the rules as presented if need be.  About the closest a game could come would be making following the rules and cleaving to genre convention the optimal path to victory in most cases.  Which is not so much forcing the second style as disguising the first style as the second.


And, what if there is a continuum between the two?  What difference does that make to the theory?  

It /would/ imply that the styles are not mutually exclusive, and therefor a game could (perhaps should) support both rather than cater to one or the other.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 28, 2014)

I continue to disagree that anything was wrong with the OP's presentation other than that you could discern his personal preference from his writing.  I think people perceived it as an attack on their style and received it poorly.

I disagree that the styles are considered "mutually incompatible" any more than other styles - simply that one or the other is favored.

I also think your definition of the two styles is slightly off in terms of focus.  Combat as War is not about defying rules or genre conventions - rules are a part of any game, and genre is irrelevant to the topic.  Combat as War is about overcoming obstacles through open-ended problem solving.  Combat as Sport limits the problem-solving to the context of the scene or frame.

The point about rules comes down to that CaW players want rules for summoning, polymorphing, teleporting, and other exploits that many CaS players consider to be harmful to game balance.  (Again, we're talking about a continuum of preferences here.)  So one system might favor one end and disfavor the other.

And "encourage" a style of play is better than "force".


----------



## Tony Vargas (Jul 28, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I also think your definition of the two styles is slightly off in terms of focus.  Combat as War is not about defying rules or genre conventions - rules are a part of any game, and genre is irrelevant to the topic.  Combat as War is about overcoming obstacles through open-ended problem solving.



 Open-ended would, perforce, include all sorts of things that could work:  including bending, breaking, or merely leveraging rules, metagaming, or sacrificing (or leveraging) genre fidelity, in-character play, simulation or whatever else the game tries to do on the surface, to achieve success.



> Combat as Sport limits the problem-solving to the context of the scene or frame.



'Scene' in the RPG-as-collective-storytelling sense I get.  And, yes, I'd argue that'd include genre conventions.

"Frame?"



> The point about rules comes down to that CaW players want rules for summoning, polymorphing, teleporting, and other exploits that many CaS players consider to be harmful to game balance.



 That's a /very/ specific point, one too specific to come up with some high-level rationalization for, really.  

And, really, you can have rules for summoning, polymorphing, and teleportation that aren't game-breaking.  So, it's not really those things that are at issue - it's whether the rules (any rules) break easily.  



> And "encourage" a style of play is better than "force".



 It would be, yes.  But if we stick to merely 'support' or 'encourage' it's hard to find any rule that really does that.  It's hard to discourage 'CaW,' for instance, because it doesn't, by it's very nature, let itself be limited by what the rules encourage or discourage.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 28, 2014)

I'm curious as to why it seems important to you to bring genre into it.  I suspect it may be important to your dislike of the concept.

Incidentally, I decided to go back through the original thread - and I can't really find any of the level of anger or hostility people seem to associate with the concept.  Even the argument you got into about "balance" seemed pretty well-behaved.  There seems to be other issues at work here.


----------



## Tony Vargas (Jul 28, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I'm curious as to why it seems important to you to bring genre into it.  I suspect it may be important to your dislike of the concept.



 There really aren't very many things that limit your freedom to approach problems from a variety of angles in an RPG.  The rules are the obvious one.  But D&D, except for 3.x and the whole 'RAW' zietgiest, of course, has a long tradition of tweaking or overriding the rules.  Expectations - like genre conventions - are the only other thing I could think of that might be an issue.  

I suppose you could think of it as 'spirit of the rules,' instead, if that makes more sense to you.  (I am trying to avoid anything as inflammatory as 'sense of fair play' or 'cheating.')




> Incidentally, I decided to go back through the original thread - and I can't really find any of the level of anger or hostility people seem to associate with the concept.



 Portions of the original thread may no longer be available.

I mean, I could tell you I'm not angry or hostile (I'm actually trying to argue /against/ hostility), but I /do/ object to problematic 'theories' that seek to divide the hobby into arbitrary us/them halves for purposes of talking up a favored thing (be it a 'style' or one side of the edition war or whatever), and dumping on those who don't embrace it.



Also: what did you mean by "Frame," above?


----------



## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> You seem to be working very hard to avoid talking about what _can_, potentially, _on the outside_, happen, whilst avoiding acknowledging what the mechanics might make likely. I'm not following closely but, just because something can, technically, happen, just because you've seen it happen, doesn't mean it's very likely in the mechanics.
> 
> You say "I'm not going to get hung up on...", and that's nice for you, but if that's a common result of using a system RAW or the like, that's certainly an issue that should be acknowledged, and airily dismissing it, as you really appear to be doing, doesn't really contribute anything.
> 
> Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick, though.




In fairness, I truly think you have the "wrong end of the stick" on this one.

My attitude has long been that 3E allows ALL KINDS of really bad things to happen.  
You can build terrible characters.  You can break the system a million different ways.  We could go on and on with game-wreaking things that 3E/PF do nothing to prevent. 
I find that players who set their mind AND ATTITUDE to it can stop these things.  And further, I find that when the rules try to stop these things they can succeed.  But they do way more harm than good FOR ME.  (also for a lot of people I game with, perhaps we are the lucky freaks of gaming.  I don't think so, but for sake of discussion I'll concede that we are if it helps.)

Hussar said that these things simply happen.  I asked if he meant "for him" or if they were unavoidable truths (or some wording to that general effect).  So far the agreement that "for him" applies is not forthcoming.

I respect complaints about what the game I love can and does do at other tables.  I respect the love of 4E felt by some people.  I truly believe in play what you like, and I think I grok better than most not just diversity of taste but multiple axises of taste.  

But don't tell me my game doesn't happen.  That just makes you look silly.  (The general "you" here, not RE you.    )


----------



## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> In fairness, I truly think you have the "wrong end of the stick" on this one.
> 
> My attitude has long been that 3E allows ALL KINDS of really bad things to happen.
> You can build terrible characters.  You can break the system a million different ways.  We could go on and on with game-wreaking things that 3E/PF do nothing to prevent.
> I find that players who set their mind AND ATTITUDE to it can stop these things.



 I was right there with you in the 3.x era.  That really was the best defense of 3.x, that it gave you the freedom to really screw up the game, but you could choose not to do so.  A good DM presenting just the right mix of challenges, some pro-active player restraint, and you could have a good campaign in spite of everything - and do so without having to resort to a thick stack of house-rules like you might've done under AD&D.



> And further, I find that when the rules try to stop these things they can succeed.  But they do way more harm than good FOR ME.



 Rhetorically, the thing for me to say, here, is that, while I understand the above, I don't get this part.  Actually, I absolutely do get it.  I get the guy who has a car that he has to push-start every time, who doesn't want a new one.  Telling him it's a better car doesn't help, telling him he could push start the new car if he really wanted to doesn't help.  

Where I feel compelled to argue against this is the way it was used in the edition war, begrudging everyone else their less-broken version of the game.  I get that's not what you're trying to say here, but, none-the-less, that is the agenda that stories like yours were used to advance.  Just because one guy, or a few, or a lot, have a personal reason for wanting a car that doesn't start doesn't mean starters should be illegal - or even obliged to be after-market options - on all new cars.



> But don't tell me my game doesn't happen.



 I will say that the fact your game could happen didn't mean that 4e deserved to get the axe.  Nor does it mean that 5e has to continue going back to being badly-balanced in the same ways.


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## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I will say that the fact your game could happen didn't mean that 4e deserved to get the axe.



Oh, God, I would never claim that my game SHOULD have anything to do with ANY game's fate for better or worse.

4E deserved to get the axe because it didn't cater to the market.



> Nor does it mean that 5e has to continue going back to being badly-balanced in the same ways.



And, MY GAME, means nothing.  I think emulating success seems to make more sense that following a path to "the axe".


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## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I will say that the fact your game could happen ....



would you mention this to Hussar for me?


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## pemerton (Jul 29, 2014)

Hussar said:


> If a group is consistently beating the odds, on a consistent basis, then the odds are not what they think they are.  They cannot be.



The odds of me running a 10-second 100m sprint are zero. The odds of a world champion running that speed might be close to 100%. But that doesn't mean that it isn't hard for the champion sprinter to run that time: I'm pretty sure that sprinter is working and training hard all the time in order to maintain that level of performance.

In other words, the odds of success aren't per se a measure of difficulty, because it may be that hard work is a major contributor to those odds which, but for that work, would be much worse for the players/PCs.



Savage Wombat said:


> Combat as War is about overcoming obstacles through open-ended problem solving.  Combat as Sport limits the problem-solving to the context of the scene or frame.
> 
> The point about rules comes down to that CaW players want rules for summoning, polymorphing, teleporting, and other exploits that many CaS players consider to be harmful to game balance.



I don't really grasp the contrast between "open-ended problem solving" and "problem solving within the context of the scene or frame". Why can't problem solving within the context of the scene or frame be open-ended?

If the emphasis is on "open-endedness", then I don't see how any RPG doesn't permit that.

If the emphasis is on the unit of play (which eg  [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] has mentioned upthread) then I don't really think that war/sport is a very helpful terminology (for the reasons that  [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] and  [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] have given).

Rapid-deployment long-range teleport is problematic for scene-focused play, because of the authority it gives players to unilaterally reframe the scene. But I don't really see what summoning or polymorph have to do with any contrast in this neighbourhood.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Libramarian said:


> One can imagine Combat-as-Sport _about_ ambushing the other team and hiring fans to take potshots. This is what refluffing powers and/or using pg 42 in 4e is like. You can describe your move however you like, but it's still Combat-as-Sport because you know what the consequences are going to be. There's no "going with your gut" involved.




Then in my experience one of two things is true
1: Combat as Sport _does not exist_
2: Combat as War is predicated on people who do not understand the world they live in.



> Coming up with crazy schemes (eg @_*Daztur*_'s example from the original thread with the bees) is definitely fun when it works, but not so much when your plan tumbles like a house of cards because of something you didn't expect. Whether or not you like this depends on whether the fun outweighs the frustration.




And I love 4e because it is far better for me _as DM_ to enable such schemes.



Iosue said:


> Look, here's the primary difference between Combat as War vs Combat as Sport, at least as Daztur suggested (I make no claim about how edition warriors may have abused it).  Do you find lots of short, one-sided curbstomp battles appealing?  If so, you like Combat as War.  Do you find a succession of one-sided curbstomp battles boring, and prefer battles with a little more granularity, a little give and take?  If so, you like Combat as Sport.  I mean, it's right there in the post that linked to earlier in the thread.  There's nothing there about combat as war being a statistically accurate representation of battles in war.  It all comes down to do you want your combat to be like the fencing matching Princess Bride, or like Indy shooting the swordsman in Raiders?




Personally I find one sided curbstomping battles to be two things
1: Roleplaying a systematic bully
2: An utter and pointless waste of resources that could better be put to use elsewhere

I would far, far rather avoid any such battles.  Either by intimidating the enemy out of the fight, diplomancing them to work for us, or tricking them into attacking my enemies.  Is this combat as sport or combat as war?



Savage Wombat said:


> Combat as War is a knight riding against an opposing army.  He doesn't want a fair fight, he wants to win.  He'd rather ride against the peasant militia if he has to, because they can't hurt him up there on his horse.  If he's forced to fight an opposing knight, he uses whatever tactics he thinks he can win with.




And this is just amusing.  The Knight wants a "fair fight".  Quite explicitly so.  With a fair fight including trying to ban the crossbow and knowing that they will be ransomed.  Medaeval warfare was, for the knights, a bloody and dangerous sport - but a sport nonetheless.  For the peasants ... it wasn't.


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## Iosue (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Personally I find one sided curbstomping battles to be two things
> 1: Roleplaying a systematic bully
> 2: An utter and pointless waste of resources that could better be put to use elsewhere
> 
> I would far, far rather avoid any such battles.  Either by intimidating the enemy out of the fight, diplomancing them to work for us, or tricking them into attacking my enemies.  Is this combat as sport or combat as war?



It's not combat anything.  It's intimidation, diplomacy, and trickery.  Everything that happens _outside_ of combat.  I'm asking about _actual combat_.  (In the game of course.)


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> would you mention this to Hussar for me?



 Hey, Hussar:  from 2000-2008 I played in not one, but two 3.x campaigns that went from 1st-14th level, and, through an extraordinary combination of skilled DMing and player restraint, avoided most of the commonly-noticed problems with 3e until the last few levels.  

Mind you, we also went on to play 4e and found it a serious improvement over 3.5, as well - in fact (and here, I'll have the same problem as you in that people won't believe me), we were pleased with how much /faster/ combats were in 4e.  And, I've played and DM'd 4e for its entire run with great success to levels as high as 26th, without the cracks showing like they did in 3e.  



> Oh, God, I would never claim that my game SHOULD have anything to do with ANY game's fate for better or worse.
> 
> 4E deserved to get the axe because it didn't cater to the market.



You just contradicted yourself.  You said out of one side of your mouth that you were just speaking for yourself, and then out the other you imply that no, objections like yours rightly killed 4e, because you somehow represent 'the market.' 

Sure, 4e was an ambitious, in retrospect ill-advised, gamble that tried to take D&D mainstream and make money on the scale of CCGs and MMOs and it failed /at that/.  At 'catering to' a much larger market that D&D has consistently failed to penetrate since the end of the fad years.  By that standard, every edition of D&D has failed.


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## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> You just contradicted yourself.  You said out of one side of your mouth that you were just speaking for yourself, and then out the other you imply that no, objections like yours rightly killed 4e, because you somehow represent 'the market.'



No, the actions of the market represent the market.  I still make noi claim that the vast number of other people who also happened to share my distaste for 4E shared that distaste for the same reasons.



> Sure, 4e was an ambitious, in retrospect ill-advised, gamble that tried to take D&D mainstream and make money on the scale of CCGs and MMOs and it failed /at that/.  At 'catering to' a much larger market that D&D has consistently failed to penetrate since the end of the fad years.  By that standard, every edition of D&D has failed.



Oh, I wildly agree with you that compared to almost everything else in the universe D&D is a micro-marketplace.
I am amused about arguing over how to best be an elf as much as I enjoy it.

But, there is a TTRPG marketplace.  And within that marketplace there are games that appeal to a wide range of players and games that do not.


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## Hussar (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> would you mention this to Hussar for me?




I ignored it BryonD because I never said it.  I never said your game didn't happen.  What I said was that I think you are mistaken about the reasons that it happened.  It didn't happen by chance.  It didn't happen because you beat the odds consistently.  

It happened because, as you say, you and your "lucky freaks of gaming" deliberately set out to make this happen.  Which is the antithesis of "Combat as War" where random elements are supposed to be the rule, not the exception.  You, as DM, have set out scenarios deliberately designed for your group.  Your players have deliberately chosen a style of play which suits the kinds of adventures that your present.

IOW, it's all combat as sport.  It's pure, 100%, artifice.  The players succeed because the scenarios are designed in such a way that the players will most likely succeed, not because they managed to manipulate the odds.  The fact that the odds could be manipulated in the first place is artifice.  The knight gathering the peasant levy (to borrow an example from above) succeeds because the DM allows the knight player to gather a peasant levy.  Shock and surprise, there will be enough peasants to levy, if and only if, the DM decides that this is a viable tactic.

So, no, I am in no way saying you didn't have the experience you had.  That would be ridiculous.  What I am saying is the reason you had that experience is, as you say, because you and your players deliberately worked to gain that particular experience.  Not random chance.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

pemerton said:


> If the emphasis is on "open-endedness", then I don't see how any RPG doesn't permit that.



 There are some clear ways that RPGs constrain open-ended play.  The big one is the rules.  If there are things the rules won't let you do, that's less open-ended.  The other thing that constrains you in an RPG are all those other considerations besides what's optimal for victory:  what's in-character, what's expected in the genre, what's expected in the context of the group.  They're 'soft' constraints, but they're there.



> If the emphasis is on the unit of play (which eg  [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] has mentioned upthread) then I don't really think that war/sport is a very helpful terminology (for the reasons that  [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] and  [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] have given).
> 
> Rapid-deployment long-range teleport is problematic for scene-focused play, because of the authority it gives players to unilaterally reframe the scene. But I don't really see what summoning or polymorph have to do with any contrast in this neighbourhood.



 They're both examples of problematic or broken rules in some editions that were fixed in 4e.  Summoning, in 4e, didn't break the action economy too badly, while in other editions it did.  Polymorph was crazy-broken in early 3.x and still pretty problematic post-errata, while having drawbacks in AD&D (when Poly-Self only gave you movement abilities, and Poly-Other carried a non-trivial risk of character loss), and prettymuch a non-issue in 4e (largely cosmetic except as modeled by specific powers).

That's why it's important to remember that CaW/CaS was a product of the edition war.


----------



## Hussar (Jul 29, 2014)

pemerton said:


> The odds of me running a 10-second 100m sprint are zero. The odds of a world champion running that speed might be close to 100%. But that doesn't mean that it isn't hard for the champion sprinter to run that time: I'm pretty sure that sprinter is working and training hard all the time in order to maintain that level of performance.
> 
> In other words, the odds of success aren't per se a measure of difficulty, because it may be that hard work is a major contributor to those odds which, but for that work, would be much worse for the players/PCs.
> /snip




But, odds of success are a measure of difficulty IN A GAME.  It's somewhat disingenuous to keep pointing to real world examples where success is not determined by a random die roll.  The example of child birth, your example of running a sprint, both are very controllable events in the real world because you have access to virtually 100% of the information that you need, every time.

In a game, that is virtually never true.  The players rarely have access to that level of information.  Nowhere near usually.  In order for your idea to work, the players would have to have access to the same levels of information that the sprinter or the doctor has, every single encounter.

Since they don't, then random chance rules.  In a combat as war scenario, random elements should be much stronger, since the PC's are not protected by the "combat as sport" idea of rules.  If the dice say you die, then you die.  If the DM monkey piles your cleric, because that would be a good tactic, then your cleric dies.  If the bear doesn't stop mauling your fighter after he stops moving (continue attacking after the character reaches negative HP), then so be it.  That's what combat as war should mean.

But, AFAIC, it doesn't exist in D&D.  We don't DM that way.  DMing that way is generally considered bad DMing.  And, the fact that parties succeed about 95% of the time belies the idea of combat as war.


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## Hussar (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Hey, Hussar:  from 2000-2008 I played in not one, but two 3.x campaigns that went from 1st-14th level, and, through an extraordinary combination of skilled DMing and player restraint, avoided most of the commonly-noticed problems with 3e until the last few levels.
> 
> Mind you, we also went on to play 4e and found it a serious improvement over 3.5, as well.  And, I've played and DM'd 4e for its entire run with great success to levels as high as 26th, without the cracks showing like they did in 3e.
> /snip




I'd just like to point out that my experience is largely the same.  I ran one campaign from 1st to 18th (The World's Largest Dungeon), and the Savage Tide AP (up to 10th level) just to name two campaigns in 3e/3.5.  And, yup, same experiences - player restraint avoided most of the commonly noticed problems.  Heck, we never had a caster issue because no one played a tier 1 character for years.  Everyone hated Vancian casting.

BryonD is under the mistaken impression that because I find that 4e fixed many of 3e's issues, that I somehow hate 3e.  The single biggest reason I play 4e is because it's a thousand times easier for me to prepare adventures in 4e than it was in 3e.  Again, for me.  The mountain of work it was for me to run a 3e campaign meant that long before 4e was even a gleam in anyone's eye, I had given up prepping adventures for 3e and had gone purely to running modules.  

If Pathfinder had fixed that issue with 3e, then I'd probably be playing Pathfinder.  But, it didn't.  Pathfinder is just as much work to DM as 3e is and I'm far, far too busy to put that much work into prepping sessions.  I just don't have that kind of time anymore.  So, 4e gets the nod, despite its failings.  I'd consider going back to AD&D because of the ease of prep, but, the lack of tactical depth that I got with 3e and then 4e means that I would not enjoy it that much.  So, again, I stick to 4e. 

5e looks like it's hit a nice balance.  Good tactical level choices mixed with strategic level options and the return of logistical level choices as well.  Seems like a good balance to me.  3e focuses so much on strategic level choices that I get swamped (as the DM) trying to prepare.  4e abandoned a lot of the strategic level in favor of the tactical level which makes it much easier to prep (no spell lists as one example) but, loses a lot of strategic level fun (which is where I believe the Combat as War fans reside).  

For example, in the knight levying peasants example, that would be problematic in 4e since adding that many combatants to a fight would make the fight take FOREVER to resolve.  Dragging a fight out to two hours at the table is not my idea of fun.  So the strategic level tends to get ignored in favor of tactics.

And, let's be honest, neither 3e nor 4e is interested in logistics.  Both systems heal far too quickly, and make resources far too easy to replace.  And I enjoy the logistical level of play as well.  

I think the model of CaW vs CaS tends to be too simplistic.  There should be three elements there and they are all important.  Ignoring one and emphasizing another just causes problems.  As I said, I think 5e is striking a nice balance here.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> > Sure, 4e was an ambitious, in retrospect ill-advised, gamble that tried to take D&D mainstream and make money on the scale of CCGs and MMOs and it failed /at that/. At 'catering to' a much larger market that D&D has consistently failed to penetrate since the end of the fad years. By that standard, every edition of D&D has failed.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



 Really, it's a very niche marketplace.  D&D dominated because so many folks in the hobby started with it - there's always curiosity about the new edition, and it's always easier to find a group of gamers who have all played D&D than it is with any other game.  4e didn't have any less appeal than any other edition of D&D in that sense.  It probably had more/broader appeal than most other editions, including being more successful at retaining new players.  It's just that even if it appealed to the /whole/ TTRPG market, it wouldn't have been able to meet the goals set for it.  

And, of course, that those to whom it didn't appeal were willing to wage the edition war against it.


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## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> even if it appealed to the /whole/ TTRPG market



 Thats one huge "if" right there.



> And, of course, that those to whom it didn't appeal were willing to wage the edition war against it.



Yeah, it did have that effect on a very large number of people, didn't it?


----------



## Iosue (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> It probably had more/broader appeal than most other editions, including being more successful at retaining new players.



That's highly unlikely.  Per Mearls, they found that while the Starter Sets sold well, people weren't moving on to the rest of the game.  Thus the attempt of simpler classes with Essentials, and then basically starting from scratch to create a game with easier buy-in.


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## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Hussar said:


> BryonD is under the mistaken impression that because I find that 4e fixed many of 3e's issues, that I somehow hate 3e.



Hussar is under the mistaken impression that putting false words in someone's mouth makes them true.

so after, once again, putting false words in my mouth you go into a change-the-subject song and dance.

You said:


Hussar said:


> This is where I disagree.  Unpredictable consequences might snowball into dramatic showdowns, but, because they're unpredictable, most often won't.



I replied: Do you mean "to you"?

So, do you mean "to you"?


----------



## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Thats one huge "if" right there.



 It is, indeed, another thing D&D has never done, even as the de-facto gate-keeper of the community:  a few folks who don't really care for it slip through and get hooked on other games, never looking back.




> Yeah, it did have that effect on a very large number of people, didn't it?



 Actual edition warriors were really pretty few.  And their antics reflected on them - not on the game they favored or dis-favored.


----------



## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> It is, indeed, another thing D&D has never done, even as the de-facto gate-keeper of the community:  a few folks who don't really care for it slip through and get hooked on other games, never looking back.



Well, that is a massive moving of goalposts.  If 4E had come *anywhere near* the level of popularity of prior editions, we would not be talking about 5E right now.



> Actual edition warriors were really pretty few.  And their antics reflected on them - not on the game they favored or dis-favored.



You seemed to think there were pretty influential when you brought them up a few minutes ago....


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

Hussar said:


> This is where I disagree.  Unpredictable consequences might snowball into dramatic showdowns, but, because they're unpredictable, most often won't.  After all, "dramatic showdown" is just one of several scenarios and frequently not even the most likely since as soon as they become most likely, it's not longer CaW but CaS.  That's what CaS is supposed to do after all.



 The Soccer analogy holds, though:  it may be a low-scoring game, so not exciting 'most of the time,' but each goal is greeted with great excitement, precisely because they're comparatively rare.


----------



## pemerton (Jul 29, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, odds of success are a measure of difficulty IN A GAME.  It's somewhat disingenuous to keep pointing to real world examples where success is not determined by a random die roll.  The example of child birth, your example of running a sprint, both are very controllable events in the real world because you have access to virtually 100% of the information that you need, every time.
> 
> In a game, that is virtually never true.  The players rarely have access to that level of information.
> 
> ...



Well, I don't really subscribe to the CaW/CaS dichotomy, for reasons I stated a few posts upthread.

But as to whether or not player choices can significantly alter the prospects of success in RPG action resolution: my view, based on my experience, is that they can, at least in certain systems. Runequest is a system in which I think player choices within the context of resolution probably have the least impact, because it is straight % dice rolls - so once the conflict is framed, it all comes down to the dice.

But in 4e, to pick a system closer to the opposite end of a notional spectrum, there is scope for player choice at nearly every point of play, not only once the conflict is framed, but in the deployment of resources at every turn. And player choices absolutely can make a difference to this. If the dice say you die then you die, but the players have lots of opportunities to make choices to stop the dice from saying that.

A pretty trivial example from my last session: the players were healing up during a short rest, and the cleric cast Word of Vigour (which hadn't been used during the encounter). The cleric has the Shared Healing feat, so any PC can spend the surge for any other PC. The players spent a few minutes discussing this and decided to have the paladin (who has a bucketload of surges from a Ring of Tenacious Will) spend all the surges - which then left the defenders with 10 surges each, and the strikers and controller with one on 5, one on 6 and one on 7. This sort of surge-management is part of managing the odds.


----------



## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Well, that is a massive moving of goalposts.  If 4E had come *anywhere near* the level of popularity of prior editions, we would not be talking about 5E right now.



 Even if 4e had won the entire TTRPG market, we likely would be.  The goals set it were that unrealistically high, even pulling in double the revenue of the entire RPG industry would have fallen well short.  When those goals weren't met, Hasbro withdrew resources, WotC retrenched with cheaper-to-produce Essentials, which tanked, and 5e was the only option left to them.

The good news is that Hasbro no longer has the 'core brand' rubric /and/ is no longer holding D&D separately accountable from the rest of WotC's brands (which include high-performing CCGs - an industry many, many times the size of the RPG market), so 5e is prettymuch a shoe-in to 'succeed,' even if it fails to unseat Pathfinder.




> You seemed to think there were pretty influential when you brought them up a few minutes ago....



 Not incompatible with being few in number and being responsible for their own behavior.


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## pemerton (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> There are some clear ways that RPGs constrain open-ended play.  The big one is the rules.  If there are things the rules won't let you do, that's less open-ended.



Well, no RPG is open-ended in the sense of anything conceivable being possible (eg in any edition of D&D it's not possible for a first level PC to call down a meteor storm, even though such a thing is conceivable).

I took open-ended to mean "no practical limit to the range of options", rather than "every conceivable option is available".



Tony Vargas said:


> They're both examples of problematic or broken rules in some editions that were fixed in 4e.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> That's why it's important to remember that CaW/CaS was a product of the edition war.



I know that/why polymorph and summoning were problematic in 3E. But I don't see how that has anything to do with combat as war. Polymorph self in 1st ed AD&D is not especially broken, but I thought AD&D was meant to be a CaW edition.

When I played Rolemaster for nearly 20 years it was a very strategic/logistically-focused game, with lots of scry-buff-teleport and the like, and hence CaW (to use that terminology). But that doesn't mean that we embraced broken abilities. When we identified broken spells, we took steps to fix or ban them.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I know that/why polymorph and summoning were problematic in 3E. But I don't see how that has anything to do with combat as war. Polymorph self in 1st ed AD&D is not especially broken, but I thought AD&D was meant to be a CaW edition.



 Certainly, AD&D was called out as CaW edition (any edition but 4e was, IIRC), and Poly-Other having a severe potential consequence balancing it's potential abuses probably only made it more appealing in that sense.  

Potential for abuse seems to have been of prime importance in CaW - again, as conceived in the edition war, when folks were warring against an edition that had reined in a lot of potential for abuse.


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## Iosue (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> That's why it's important to remember that CaW/CaS was a product of the edition war.



CaW/CaS was a product of spitballing about how 5e could be designed to accommodate different playstyles.  Are you just arguing from memory?  I take it you didn't actually look at the original post linked to in this thread?


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## Iosue (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Certainly, AD&D was called out as CaW edition (any edition but 4e was, IIRC), and Poly-Other having a severe potential consequence balancing it's potential abuses probably only made it more appealing in that sense.




"With 3ed the game shifted a bit towards Combat as Sport and then shifted  a good bit more with 4ed (although you can still certainly run 4ed as a  Combat as War game with heavy use of things like rituals, but the main  thrust of the game is towards Combat as Sport)."

Why rely on what you recall?  I linked to the original post.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I mean, I could tell you I'm not angry or hostile (I'm actually trying to argue /against/ hostility), but I /do/ object to problematic 'theories' that seek to divide the hobby into arbitrary us/them halves for purposes of talking up a favored thing (be it a 'style' or one side of the edition war or whatever), and dumping on those who don't embrace it.




I can tell by your writing style that you aren't trying to be angry or hostile, but then you also deliberately use loaded phrases like "dumping on".  It suggests to me that you feel that this entire discussion is nothing but an unfair attempt to criticize 4e, as opposed to a discussion of why some players prefer different rules than others.  Am I incorrect?



Tony Vargas said:


> Also: what did you mean by "Frame," above?




Frame or scene or encounter or whatever, in this case.  You probably have a more definite understanding of the word in this context than I have developed.



pemerton said:


> I don't really grasp the contrast between "open-ended problem solving" and "problem solving within the context of the scene or frame". Why can't problem solving within the context of the scene or frame be open-ended?




Because it's limited to the context.  I know good DMs work around this, but most published encounters assume that you solve the problem of the encounter you're in, and don't drag in the monsters next door or the guards from the nearby village.  So if the players are limited to the immediate circumstances of the encounter, it's not truly open-ended.



Neonchameleon said:


> I would far, far rather avoid any such battles.  Either by intimidating the enemy out of the fight, diplomancing them to work for us, or tricking them into attacking my enemies.  Is this combat as sport or combat as war?




I submit that game tactics that could not be adjudicated by a computer probably fall under CaW.  Just my first impression.



Neonchameleon said:


> And this is just amusing.  The Knight wants a "fair fight".  Quite explicitly so.  With a fair fight including trying to ban the crossbow and knowing that they will be ransomed.  Medaeval warfare was, for the knights, a bloody and dangerous sport - but a sport nonetheless.  For the peasants ... it wasn't.




No, manipulating the circumstances of battle by getting kings to ban the weapon most dangerous to you is the one-sided CaW model.



pemerton said:


> I know that/why polymorph and summoning were problematic in 3E. But I don't see how that has anything to do with combat as war. Polymorph self in 1st ed AD&D is not especially broken, but I thought AD&D was meant to be a CaW edition.
> 
> When I played Rolemaster for nearly 20 years it was a very strategic/logistically-focused game, with lots of scry-buff-teleport and the like, and hence CaW (to use that terminology). But that doesn't mean that we embraced broken abilities. When we identified broken spells, we took steps to fix or ban them.




CaW players want to have as many options as possible.  Spells with practically unlimited uses are of help to them, either balanced or broken.  It might be reasonable to say that CaW players don't require broken rules, but they do need "breakable" ones, with the potential for future abuse.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

Feb 1, 2012, the edition war was still raging, it had shifted to trying to force 5e into the shape of the warrior's favored edition, but it hadn't ended.



> The main point of this post was trying to understand why a lot of the posts of 4ed fans sound like crazy moon logic to me while mine seem insane to them, I think this is a better rubric than most I've seen for providing an explanation for that.



 Seeking a justification for the edition war, and, like the other quote a post of two above, making the OP's side on that conflict clear.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> No, manipulating the circumstances of battle by getting kings to ban the weapon most dangerous to you is the one-sided CaW model.




That was done by the Kings.  Very few individual knights were involved in that.  CaW would be the realm of REMFs and politicians to enable the Knights to play CaS.



> CaW players want to have as many options as possible.  Spells with practically unlimited uses are of help to them, either balanced or broken.  It might be reasonable to say that CaW players don't require broken rules, but they do need "breakable" ones, with the potential for future abuse.




*reads this*

*looks at the AD&D Fighter - or the AD&D Rogue for that matter*

Right.  Gotcha.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> That was done by the Kings.  Very few individual knights were involved in that.  CaW would be the realm of REMFs and politicians to enable the Knights to play CaS.




Not all Knights were politicians, but lots of politicians were knights at some point.  Wasn't it a King Henry that was killed in a joust?




Neonchameleon said:


> *reads this*
> 
> *looks at the AD&D Fighter - or the AD&D Rogue for that matter*
> 
> Right.  Gotcha.




Gotcha back.  Glad we're on the same wavelength then.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Not all Knights were politicians, but lots of politicians were knights at some point.  Wasn't it a King Henry that was killed in a joust?




There were lots of them.  And as you mention, jousts are emphatically sports.  King Henry II of France being killed in a sporting accident makes CaW more likely?  



> Gotcha back.  Glad we're on the same wavelength then.




That AD&D is by your definitions _terrible_ for CaW for two of the four core classes?  And if you want real CaW come and play 4e with utility powers for everyone?


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I can tell by your writing style that you aren't trying to be angry or hostile, but then you also deliberately use loaded phrases like "dumping on".



 It's an accurate description.  That it's negative is only because it describes a negative activity.



> It suggests to me that you feel that this entire discussion is nothing but an unfair attempt to criticize 4e, as opposed to a discussion of why some players prefer different rules than others.  Am I incorrect?



 Whether you mean CaW/CaS or the OP of this thread, they are nothing more than a way of justifying one playstyle preference by contrasting it against a strawman standing in for all other preferences.  The false dichotomy or us/them perspective I keep talking about.  There are not only two ways to play an RPG.  That there's more than one of these false dichotomies running around is, ironically, proof enough of that.

Which edition that sort of tactic was used to attack in the edition war, notwithstanding.





> Frame or scene or encounter or whatever, in this case.  You probably have a more definite understanding of the word in this context than I have developed.



 Not sure what you're getting at with the distinction.  Within the context of a 'scene' or 'story,' 'encounter' or 'day,' you'll have options that are technically open to the character that would be at odds with the genre the game emulates or the themes the campaign explores.  Likewise, there'll be rules that limit options - or, conversely, provide opportunities to leverage them in some way.




> CaW players want to have as many options as possible.  Spells with practically unlimited uses are of help to them, either balanced or broken.  It might be reasonable to say that CaW players don't require broken rules, but they do need "breakable" ones, with the potential for future abuse.



 Interesting way of putting it.  But, yes, the bottom line is that the rules are to be used to secure victory, rather than followed for the sake of any other quality of the RPG experience.


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## pemerton (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Because it's limited to the context.  I know good DMs work around this, but most published encounters assume that you solve the problem of the encounter you're in, and don't drag in the monsters next door or the guards from the nearby village.  So if the players are limited to the immediate circumstances of the encounter, it's not truly open-ended.



Well, in any RPG the players are limited to the immediate circumstances of the campaign/gameworld/whatever. So no RPG is truly open-ended!

I mean, in an encounter-based game it's obvious that the players won't be bleeding the resolution of one encounter into the next - that's a tautology. But that doesn't mean their options aren't open-ended.



Savage Wombat said:


> CaW players want to have as many options as possible.  Spells with practically unlimited uses are of help to them, either balanced or broken.  It might be reasonable to say that CaW players don't require broken rules, but they do need "breakable" ones, with the potential for future abuse.



I don't really follow the move from "options" to "spells" to "rules".

Presumably it is possible to play a "CaW" game in a non-fantasy RPG (eg Classic Traveller), or in a fantasy RPG where all the PCs are non-casters (eg the classic AD&D thief campaign). And I'm pretty sure that it should be possible to play "CaW" - that is, a game focused on the strategic and logistical level of play rather than a scene-focused game - without breaking the rules (again, Classic Traveller would be a good vehicle for this, and so might RQ or RM).

Breaking the game by abusing polymorph self or shapechange strikes me as somewhat distinctive to 3E play, and pretty incidental to "CaW".


----------



## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> There were lots of them.  And as you mention, jousts are emphatically sports.  King Henry II of France being killed in a sporting accident makes CaW more likely?




It means that King Henry II considered himself a knight to some degree, and therefore stood to benefit from laws protecting them.




Neonchameleon said:


> That AD&D is by your definitions _terrible_ for CaW for two of the four core classes?  And if you want real CaW come and play 4e with utility powers for everyone?




I was just guessing as to what your eye-rolling remark meant.  That's not what I meant at all.  Why would you think I meant that?



Tony Vargas said:


> It's an accurate description.  That it's negative is only because it describes a negative activity.
> 
> Whether you mean CaW/CaS or the OP of this thread, they are nothing more than a way of justifying one playstyle preference by contrasting it against a strawman standing in for all other preferences.  The false dichotomy or us/them perspective I keep talking about.  There are not only two ways to play an RPG.  That there's more than one of these false dichotomies running around is, ironically, proof enough of that.
> 
> Which edition that sort of tactic was used to attack in the edition war, notwithstanding.




See, from my perspective, you're the one who perceives it as an "attack".  And instead of explaining why you feel [MENTION=55680]Daztur[/MENTION] was attacking you with his concept, you simply reiterate that it was somehow obvious.  That's why I feel this is simply your personal preferences guiding your interpretation.



Tony Vargas said:


> Not sure what you're getting at with the distinction.  Within the context of a 'scene' or 'story,' 'encounter' or 'day,' you'll have options that are technically open to the character that would be at odds with the genre the game emulates or the themes the campaign explores.




You're the one who keeps bringing up genre and theme.  I haven't been discussing those, and I don't consider them a serious part of CaW/CaS theory.  It can, however, be a legitimate criticism of one particular style.  If that's what you mean here.



Tony Vargas said:


> Interesting way of putting it.  But, yes, the bottom line is that the rules are to be used to secure victory, rather than followed for the sake of any other quality of the RPG experience.




I keep feeling that, when I describe CaW, you hear "breaking the rules to get away with stuff."  Is that what you think?


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Well, in any RPG the players are limited to the immediate circumstances of the campaign/gameworld/whatever. So no RPG is truly open-ended!
> 
> I mean, in an encounter-based game it's obvious that the players won't be bleeding the resolution of one encounter into the next - that's a tautology. But that doesn't mean their options aren't open-ended.




In an encounter based game, the players probably do not have the option or ability to collapse the dungeon with multiple _rock to mud _spells.  In CaS, the players and DM agree that this takes away from the fun of the game for them.  In CaW, somebody thinks this is brilliantly creative. (Probably _not _the DM.)



pemerton said:


> I don't really follow the move from "options" to "spells" to "rules".
> 
> Presumably it is possible to play a "CaW" game in a non-fantasy RPG (eg Classic Traveller), or in a fantasy RPG where all the PCs are non-casters (eg the classic AD&D thief campaign). And I'm pretty sure that it should be possible to play "CaW" - that is, a game focused on the strategic and logistical level of play rather than a scene-focused game - without breaking the rules (again, Classic Traveller would be a good vehicle for this, and so might RQ or RM).
> 
> Breaking the game by abusing polymorph self or shapechange strikes me as somewhat distinctive to 3E play, and pretty incidental to "CaW".




Yes, these are all fine.  But nowhere have I said that pure CaW players require access to those resources, but they probably want them.  For example, I can easily see a Traveller player petitioning the GM for permission to use the optional psionic rules or whatever.  It gives them more options to work with.

And to make clear, I'm not arguing a preference here - I suspect I'd be frustrated by, and suck at, strongly CaW play.  But I think the concept is useful, and should be able to be discussed without inferring an edition war bias.


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## Emerikol (Jul 29, 2014)

Sorry for being gone so long.  I'm on vacation so my presence here is limited.  

I honestly believe that my player that disliked the "challenge" of my games honestly wanted it to be easier.  He wanted challenge in an illusionist sort of way.  He wanted something that appeared to be challenge but wasn't really challenge.

Now I'm defining challenge here as mental energy and discipline required to achieve good results.  If it is high then the challenge is higher.  If it is lower then the challenge is lower.  Of course what is challenging for one person might not be for another.  We don't all have the same level of mental acuity.  He felt after a particularly harrowing battle that he was stressed out and he didn't want to be stressed out playing a game.  What he was calling "stress" I was calling narrative tension and it is the meat and drink of my playstyle.  

You can only judge a campaign as challenging or not based upon the players in that game.


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## Emerikol (Jul 29, 2014)

Also a comment on risk mitigation.  Naturally I as DM have opinions on what NPCs and monsters would realistically do.  As a result players learn those opinions (opinions I hope are at least cinematically realistic) and construct strategies to overcome them.  That is not the be all end all of play though but it is a factor.  I like to believe my players if suddenly faced with a real situation like a D&D dungeon would really do better because of the plans they'd put into practice.  

You can't remove the DM from the equation.  Of course his opinion on reality matters.  His opinion in the fantasy world IS reality.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> See, from my perspective, you're the one who perceives it as an "attack".  And instead of explaining why you feel attacked by the concept, you simply reiterate that it was somehow obvious.



 An arbitrary us/them classification that's nothing more than a way of justifying one playstyle preference by contrasting it against a strawman standing in for all other preferences, doesn't have to be leveled at me, personally, to get me to argue against it. I maintain that such false dichotomies are not valid, and that there are not only two ways to play an RPG. 



> That's why I feel this is simply your personal preferences guiding your interpretation.



 I do not have a strong style preference with regard to CaW.  I've certainly played in that mode a lot.  I just deny that there's only one other way to play.



> I keep feeling that, when I describe CaW, you hear "breaking the rules to get away with stuff."  Is that what you think?



 "Leveraging the rules to assure success" would be a better way of putting it, in the ideal case.  Outright 'cheating' presumably wouldn't be out of the question, though, as it /is/ an open-ended, outside-the-box way of improving your chances.


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## pemerton (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> In an encounter based game, the players probably do not have the option or ability to collapse the dungeon with multiple _rock to mud _spells.



Well, there are issues here about scene-reframing. I'm still not sure why "open-ended" is being treated as equivalent to "can reframe scenes". (In a typical A&D game, the players can't just collapse the multiverse with a few well-placed Unravel Spacetime spells, after all - that is, they can't just reframe the whole campaign at will.)

But once the issue of scene reframing is put to one side, I don't see why not. If the game includes that sort of transmutation magic, then why can't it be used?

Here is an actual play report from my 4e game, of the PCs' assaul on Torog's Soul Abattoir. They used magic to dam the flow of souls, as part of their assault:

The drow sorcerer and tiefling paladin flew to the bottom of the cliff, where the paladin blew his Fire Horn to render the ice more susceptible to heat, while the drow cast Flame Spiral to melt some of the ice, and then cast Wall of Water to block the flow of souls (check-wise, this was an Arcana check by the player of the drow, with a buff from the melting of the ice and use of the wall)​
They also used Wizard's Curtain to get an ambush advantage against Torog:

They made some preparations, in the form of powering up with Wrath of the Gods (+8 to damage) and also preparing a Wizard's Curtain to improve their chances of hiding in the opening round. The sorcerer also got ready to lay down his auto-damage zone for when Torog broke through from beneath the tunnel floor. (Successful Dungeoneering from the ranger had revealed the direction Torog was coming from.)

. . .

The first attack of the combat was delivered by the paladin, who critted with Strength of Ten to push Torog back down (allowing other party members to stay hidden behind the Wizard's Curtain for an extra turn while they took their attacks).​
They also used their various mobility options to significant effect:

I had Torog burst up from beneath the tunnel floor, creating a 130' rift splitting the tunnel in two. That worked fairly well for Torog - with his CB 20 slide 5 attack, he was able to knock first the paladin down, then the ranger, sorcerer and invoker, and then the paladin again . . .

The paladin survived the first fall fine, and was able to fly back up when the ranger threw down his flying carpet. But it wasn't long before he was knocked back down again.

The 130' fall would have killed the invoker, who was already unconscious from other damage taken, but the ranger managed to grab hold of him as he fell beside him (successful Acro check) and then between his strong Acro and amulet of reducing falling distance (I can't remember its proper name) kept the damage they both took to 20 hp only.

And the sorcerer's Acro kept him alive too.

Regrouping at the bottom of the pit while the fighter solo-ed Torog (using second wind to get +8 to all defences, with a Defending polearm, which meant that Torog missed at least two of three attacks, making for another ineffectual turn), the ranger-cleric healed them all with a Word of Vigour. The invoker-wizard then leapt onto the carpet (which the paladin had readied for him), flew up with a double move and opened an Arcane Gate linking the bottom of the pit to its top. The others rushed through and Torog was dead.​
4e is supposedly the poster-child for "CaS" in contrast to "CaW". Presumably, therefore, the various events I've just described are examples of CaS. But they don't strike me as lacking open-ended options. Unless, by "open-ended" is meant "scene reframing".


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> An arbitrary us/them classification that's nothing more than a way of justifying one playstyle preference by contrasting it against a strawman standing in for all other preferences, doesn't have to be leveled at me, personally, to get me to argue against it. I maintain that such false dichotomies are not valid, and that there are not only two ways to play an RPG.




Again, you do not support your argument that a strawman is involved, or that the dichotomy is false.  A lot of people thinks it describes the games they've played quite well.  You're just asserting your dislike of the topic.

 I do not have a strong style preference with regard to CaW.  I've certainly played in that mode a lot.  I just deny that there's only one other way to play.[/QUOTE]

It doesn't sound to me like that's what you're arguing.  If there's more than one end on this continuum, what CaX would you suggest?



Tony Vargas said:


> "Leveraging the rules to assure success" would be a better way of putting it, in the ideal case.  Outright 'cheating' presumably wouldn't be out of the question, though, as it /is/ an open-ended, outside-the-box way of improving your chances.




Ok, good.  That's *not *what Combat as War is.  That might explain why you dislike the discussion.



pemerton said:


> 4e is supposedly the poster-child for "CaS" in contrast to "CaW". Presumably, therefore, the various events I've just described are examples of CaS. But they don't strike me as lacking open-ended options. Unless, by "open-ended" is meant "scene reframing".




1.  People have said that 4e is strongly dedicated to CaS in contrast to CaW.  That does not mean that one is equivalent to the other.  The existence of the phrase "Combat as Sport" is not intended as a slap at 4e.  (Portions of the article do suggest the writer's distaste for 4e - that's not the same thing as the core topic of the article.)
2.  Open-ended might indeed mean "scene reframing", since the latter is a level of game criticism language I've not fully grokked.  To the best of my understanding:

In Combat as Sport, the DM sets a scene "you see an ogre in the cave" and the players are generally expected to directly engage the ogre in some fashion (combat, magic, diplomancy, whatever) or retreat.  In Combat as War, the DM's "you see an ogre in the cave" could become "we lure the ogre out of the cave and into the nearby guardpost so he can be shot with ballistae".  And of course, nothing about a particular edition is required here one way or the other.

If that's scene reframing, then it's scene reframing.


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## Daztur (Jul 29, 2014)

As far as CaS/CaW being edition war material I can see how it can be used for ammunition for that but that really wasn't my intent. Basically I wanted to explain to 4ed fans why I want to play a different sort of game then most of them want to play in a way that 4ed fans could get behind. Basically the reaction I wanted was "aaaah yes, CaW doesn't sound fun at all to me and CaS sounds like the kind of game I want to play." Now obviously I wasn't 100% successful at this (cue Tony Vargas) but quite a few people on the original thread said "yup, CaS is just the kind of game I want to play" which means I got my idea through to at least a few people.

In the mean time I've played more 4ed and found it better roleplay fodder than my first go-round (had a lot of fun re-fluffling my powers in a way that fit fit my PC, it was a kaiju game and my PC was a shardmind brawler fighter refluffed as a Tremors worm with the personality of Darla from Finding Nemo which was I found to be rather awesome) but the same sort of things that made it easy to refluff my powers made it a bit harder to get into CaW-style play so instead I had CaS-style duels with giant robots and whatnot which I think worked very well and took advantage of the best aspects of the 4ed ruleset.

As far as CaW being cheating. Yup, that's exactly what it is. A lot of classic CaW maneuvers are basically the same thing as computer game exploits which sucks in PvP play but can be great fun if the only ones getting the raw end of the exploits are NPCs. And as far as AD&D having problems with CaW play because some classes don't get good CaW toys to play with, yup that's a problem with AD&D. In my ideal D&D rule-set there'd be proficiencies that would be very narrow, reliable and very powerful that'd allow the mundanes to cheat just as much as the casters.


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## Libramarian (Jul 29, 2014)

Hussar said:


> This is where I disagree.  Unpredictable consequences might snowball into dramatic showdowns, but, because they're unpredictable, most often won't.  After all, "dramatic showdown" is just one of several scenarios and frequently not even the most likely since as soon as they become most likely, it's not longer CaW but CaS.  That's what CaS is supposed to do after all.  The fact that you point to save or die as dramatic I think points to a basic disconnect in what people consider dramatic as well.




Well yeah, the dramatic showdowns are rare. The players spend most of their decision points trying to shift the odds in their favor. This contrasts with a game where the players at their decision points make definite, incremental progress towards their goals. I'm suggesting that association football, poker, and OSR D&D are examples of the former, while basketball, chess, and 4e D&D (played in a gamist way) are examples of the latter. Maybe learning to play guitar vs. learning to play Guitar Hero, as well. I think this captures everything I want from the CaW/CaS distinction, without the distraction of war vs. sport. I guess I would call it risk management vs. efficiency optimization (not as catchy). Shooting a dude with a scimitar and using an Owlbear to steal honey is how risk management play is realized in D&D.

There was an interesting exchange between Umbran and Majoru Oakheart last week that has informed my thoughts in this thread:


			
				Majoru Oakheart said:
			
		

> As I said in my post on the first place, extremely vague rules tend to  drive me completely bonkers.  It's like trying to play Chess when the  rules say "Pawn can move in whatever directions pawns move in.  Ask your  DM which direction he feels they should move in."
> 
> I think it's because I feel a game should have tactical choices of some  sort to actually qualify as a game.  One where you weigh the positives  and negatives of each choice and try to come up with the "best" option.   That's how you win.
> 
> ...





			
				Umbran said:
			
		

> One can make an argument that all game play is, in essence, a exercise  in risk management.  In the kind of game you seem to prefer, a large  portion of the risk is defined by the rules, and dice probabilities.   Once you get an intuitive grasp of the numbers, you're good to go in  making informed choices to manage your risk vs reward.
> 
> So, do you play poker?  Even if you don't, do you figure that poker  players don't make tactical decisions?  Remember that poker is only  partially about the rules and card probabilities.  It is also about  reading your opponent, divining their intentions.  In poker, much more  of the risk is in another person.  You can still observe, and gain an  intuitive grasp of the situation, and thus make informed choices to  manage your risk vs reward.  There is a basis for decisions, there is  simply another source of uncertainty as well.





			
				Majoru Oakheart said:
			
		

> I don't.  For almost precisely the reasons you state here.  Although  there ARE tactical decisions involved, too many of the factors are  hidden from you to make a good decision entirely from facts.  Sometimes  you just have to go with your "gut".  Which is to say, guess...with some  experience to back you up.  But it's still guessing.  I don't like to  guess, I like to KNOW.
> 
> I don't like to gamble with anything that I can't predict at least 70%  of the time.  I like things to be predictable.  That's why I don't buy  lottery tickets or go to casinos.  Everything is rigged so as to have  horrible odds.



4e was definitely designed to remove randomness from the game and "tighten the feedback loop" for player decisions, as [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] put it earlier.

I really like the gambling aspect of 1e D&D, primarily because it's fun to watch as DM. I enjoy watching the players suffer, just as I enjoy watching a soccer player miss the net. It fills me with wincing glee.

I have a death save houserule for 1e that replaces the rule that if you fall into negative HPs you need to rest for a week. I say that if you roll equal or less than your negative HPs on a d6, the character dies. If you roll over, your character lives and can be healed and continue adventuring without the week of rest. Just last session one of my players had to make a death roll. Their character was only at -1 HP so they had to roll a 2-6 to survive. They rolled a 1 and then without saying anything left the room for a minute. It was amusing.

Of course I like watching the players succeed and make miraculous escapes too.


pemerton said:


> I like your analysis. I don't know that I agree  with the connection to WF, though - goofing off isn't necessarily about  "having an experience". I think it can often be about "authorship",  about achieving some communicative effect in the real world. (Eg making a  point about your PC, or about someone else's, or making a point about  what is at stake.)



That makes sense to me. I don't think that Pulsipher is familiar with  the narrativist approach to RPGs, or if he is he didn't try to find a  place for it here. In GNS terms I would say this is about light  gamism vs. hardcore gamism.


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## Hussar (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Hussar is under the mistaken impression that putting false words in someone's mouth makes them true.
> 
> so after, once again, putting false words in my mouth you go into a change-the-subject song and dance.
> 
> ...




Nope. I'm meaning this pretty generally. Since your description of your game dovetails nicely with what I've said I'm frankly at a loss as to what you are on about.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Libramarian said:


> I really like the gambling aspect of 1e D&D, primarily because it's fun to watch as DM. I enjoy watching the players suffer, just as I enjoy watching a soccer player miss the net. It fills me with wincing glee.




This is interesting, because, as a DM, I absolutely hate that. The players are my friends, and when they suffer, I feel bad (even if they aren't my friends, as humans, I don't enjoy their suffering). If they do something dumb or nasty and consequences slap them in the face, that's great, or if they're being lazy and assumptive, I don't mind them getting walloped. But if they are genuinely trying, if they are putting their all into it, then I feel nothing but vague guilt and sorrow at them suffering. So I particularly loathe the gambling element of 1/2E, where you could do everything right and still lose easily because the dice disliked you.

I mean, I have and will TPK a party who play like morons, or decide to stick with an obviously losing strategy out of stubborn-ness or the like, but I want that to be in part my decision, in part theirs, not really "Whoops that's a lot of natural 20s!", which caused a number of TPKs in my early AD&D days (and lead to me starting to roll behind a screen and fudge).



Libramarian said:


> risk management vs. efficiency optimization




I like these terms, but like, I've never seen a party trend really strongly towards one or the other. My experience in 4E is that there's a lot of risk management. Example: party wanted to clear out some cultists from the sewers in a city, because they wanted to use the sewers as an escape route later (it's a long story!). The cultist-clearing wasn't an objective they were hired for or anything. So rather than risk their hides fighting the cultists (despite this being 4E and there being this supposed expectation that all fights are safe/sport, an expectation I guess I must have successfully subverted), they wrangled an elaborate situation which caused the city guard to fight the cultists for them. Extreme risk management! The key player behind this has never played an RPG but 4E, either.


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## pemerton (Jul 29, 2014)

Libramarian said:


> I don't think that Pulsipher is familiar with  the narrativist approach to RPGs, or if he is he didn't try to find a  place for it here. In GNS terms I would say this is about light  gamism vs. hardcore gamism.



Agreed on both points.

As I'm sure I've mentioned to you before, I think the borderline between light narrativism (which is all I would claim for my 4e game) and light gamism is pretty thin. Edwards's formal definition of narrativism is all this heavy stuff about theme, meaningful questions etc but then he includes as an example of narrativism The Dying Earth, which is pretty light-hearted (in a cynical way). In Dying Earth the aim of play is to set up opportunities to spout Vancian quips (because this is how you earn advancment points). That's ultimately not very serious, and could be easily be seen as gamist, in the mode of _charades_ or _dictionary_.



Libramarian said:


> I enjoy watching the players suffer, just as I enjoy watching a soccer player miss the net. It fills me with wincing glee.
> 
> I have a death save houserule for 1e that replaces the rule that if you fall into negative HPs you need to rest for a week. I say that if you roll equal or less than your negative HPs on a d6, the character dies. If you roll over, your character lives and can be healed and continue adventuring without the week of rest. Just last session one of my players had to make a death roll. Their character was only at -1 HP so they had to roll a 2-6 to survive. They rolled a 1 and then without saying anything left the room for a minute. It was amusing.





Ruin Explorer said:


> as a DM, I absolutely hate that.



I think I'm a bit softer than Libramarian, but I definitely see where that approach is coming from. I feel sorry for my players when they go for a big set-up and then someone rolls a 1. But I also laugh (or at least giggle - and sometimes taunt).

It's especially amusing when it's the sorcerer's player who rolls a 1. As a chaos mage, he pushes everyone within 5 sq 1 sq on a 1 (and at our table I, as GM, decide where they get pushed to). In a recent session, the roll of a 1 knocked Vecna over the side of an earthmote, just after they had come up with a plan that relied on holding Vecna in place. It was funny!



Daztur said:


> I wanted to explain to 4ed fans why I want to play a different sort of game then most of them want to play in a way that 4ed fans could get behind. Basically the reaction I wanted was "aaaah yes, CaW doesn't sound fun at all to me and CaS sounds like the kind of game I want to play."



I'd be interested in any comments on post 164, and/or the episodes of play that are linked to.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> It means that King Henry II considered  himself a knight to some degree, and therefore stood to benefit from  laws protecting them.




Nope.  A knighthood is a title.  Knights were people given knighthoods by either the king or a previous one.



> I was just guessing as to what your eye-rolling remark meant.   That's not what I meant at all.  Why would you think I meant that?




Because you were saying that Combat as War people liked options.  When you look at the AD&D fighter there _aren't_ mechanical options.  You can't even easily change your weapons.  Which means that the AD&D fighter should be the exemplar of the class you hate the most.  From which I can conclude that either
a: You think that CaW should only be undertaken by spellcasters
b: This isn't actually a consideration and CaW is just a battle flag.



> I keep feeling that, when I describe CaW, you hear "breaking the  rules to get away with stuff."  Is that what you think?




More like "we want cheap curb stomps of the enemy and would yowl to  high heaven if high level NPC mages were to take CaW seriously and start  scrying for bands of adventurers and then sticking up wanted posters  with rewards once they hit third level".



Savage Wombat said:


> In an encounter based game, the players  probably do not have the option or ability to collapse the dungeon with  multiple _rock to mud _spells.




First _2E is an encounter based game_.  Read the DMG.

Second,  in 4e I've certainly as the DM had a player create earth walls to seal  the dungeon by creating walls of rock with rituals.  This worked and was  fun - and I was the DM.



> And to make clear, I'm not  arguing a preference here - I suspect I'd be frustrated by, and suck at,  strongly CaW play.  But I think the concept is useful, and should be  able to be discussed without inferring an edition war bias.




The terms are loaded and one-sided.  And the only game I've seen  that had CAW being aimed at the PCs was Cyberpunk 2020.  In AD&D the  players are taking part in a game of padded sumo (1 minute to kill a  goblin?  Seriously?) and there are rules of engagement NPCs are expected  to follow which is why 3rd level PCs don't find prices on their heads  from being scryed, and 6th level don't get scried-and-fried if they  aren't working for the bad guys.

CaW is a big game safari at best.



Savage Wombat said:


> Again, you do not support your argument  that a strawman is involved, or that the dichotomy is false.  A lot of  people thinks it describes the games they've played quite well.  You're  just asserting your dislike of the topic.
> 
> I do not have a strong style preference with regard to CaW.  I've  certainly played in that mode a lot.  I just deny that there's only one  other way to play.




I for one don't think there's only one way to play.  I just find  "war" a risible description of any form of D&D there has ever been.   I cut my teeth on GURPS where you died to a single crossbow bolt.

Combat as Last Resort would be a decent description.  It would also exclude AD&D and oD&D.

Combat as End and Combat as Means might be a bit better?



> 1.   People have said that 4e is strongly dedicated to CaS in contrast to  CaW.  That does not mean that one is equivalent to the other.  The  existence of the phrase "Combat as Sport" is not intended as a slap at  4e.  (Portions of the article do suggest the writer's distaste for 4e -  that's not the same thing as the core topic of the article.)




Hearing  that from fans of other D&D games is like an argument between  American Football players and Soccer players about which is more of a  sport.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I think I'm a bit softer than Libramarian, but I definitely see where that approach is coming from. I feel sorry for my players when they go for a big set-up and then someone rolls a 1. But I also laugh (or at least giggle - and sometimes taunt).
> 
> It's especially amusing when it's the sorcerer's player who rolls a 1. As a chaos mage, he pushes everyone within 5 sq 1 sq on a 1 (and at our table I, as GM, decide where they get pushed to). In a recent session, the roll of a 1 knocked Vecna over the side of an earthmote, just after they had come up with a plan that relied on holding Vecna in place. It was funny!




I think it's one thing to fail to succeed once, or twice, or three times, particularly if they're doing something silly. That is usually funny. If they're playing smart, though, and the dice just hate them - which is what I take from the reference to "gambling" in a CaW scenario, then I'm not impressed by that, it's not fun, it's not big, it's not clever, it's not usually funny (all imo, of course).

What I've seen way too many times in D&D is:

A) In 1/2E - Good planning, good play, bad rolls so TPK anyway. I just don't get how this is supposed to be fun. It sucks. Everyone's game is over because the designers set up a game which is really swing-y with lots of instant death.

B) In 3.XE - Good planning, good play, bad rolls means one PC is effectively useless for an entire combat (almost never seen this in 4E because of the narrower ranges involved and the fact that you can usually choose to target NADs or the like).

I'm really unimpressed with that sort of design. I used to like it conceptually, but experience of it totally turned me off it.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Actually, I've just worked out why the playstyle claimed by the advocates of so-called Combat as War sticks in my throat so badly.

On the one side you have a large, powerful, and slow to react force.  That is expected to play in a manner that is approximately fair because otherwise it could wipe out the individuals concerned.  On the other hand you have a small and well armed but tiny force trying to win by any means necessary where any means necessary explicitly mentioned (in this thread alone) includes collapsing living quarters and burning down the entire forest the enemies live in.

This isn't warfare.  Warfare almost invariably has rules like the Geneva Convention - or the rule that once a breach has been made you surrender.  Collapsing dungeons and burning down forests puts you well into the realms of Terrorism.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Okay, then, looking up Dichotomy to see if I'm using it incorrectly.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...




...

You pretty much hit the nail on the head with "Black and White", then pulled the nail out, threw it on the floor, kicked it under the table, and said "what nail?". 

Yes, "Black" and "White" is a great analogy. You're using two terms that are the equivalent of "Black" and "White" to describe something that is pretty much always a middling shade of grey. It is absolutely actively unhelpful to call things "Black" or "White" when they're actually grey. You keep saying stuff about people preferring one or the other, whilst excluding the vast majority of people, who prefer a mix of the two - probably a mix that is so grey that it's hard to say if it's black-er or white-er, except with another shade right next to it!

So you say you want to engage in a meaningful discussion. I buy that. Your problem, then, is two-fold.

1) You are using worthless absolutist terms with a lot of baggage. You can claim they have no baggage for you, but it's clear they do for most people, so your view of the baggage is irrelevant if you want to discuss it with people who aren't you! 

The absolute nature of them is deeply unhelpful. Less absolute terms would be more helpful.

2) You appear want to suggest people all prefer one or the other, or that versions of D&D lean on way or the other. That's a fact not in evidence, indeed there's considerable evidence to the contrary!

So I am only more convinced by your excellent analogy that using the absolutist terms CaW and CaS, without modifiers or quantifiers is actively (if completely unintentionally!) unhelpful. As is the apparent belief that everyone prefers one or the other to a meaningful degree.

I mean, I'm sorry, but if I prefer 70% black and 30% white, the colour I prefer is GREY, not black. You might point out that it's slightly more black than the 50/50 guy or whatever, and a lot more black than the 30/70 dude, but we all still prefer grey. Only the guy who is at about 95/5 has something so close to black that the term is going to be appropriate.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> This isn't warfare.  Warfare almost invariably has rules like the Geneva Convention - or the rule that once a breach has been made you surrender.  Collapsing dungeons and burning down forests puts you well into the realms of Terrorism.




Well, it's stuff that pushes the boundaries, to be sure. Most importantly the PCs fail to obey even medieval "rules" or conventions of war, typically, rather than modern rules.

One might say it's not Combat-as-War, because wars are declared, and in the open, and acknowledged by both sides, for the most part, but rather "Combat-as-guerrilla-action" (note the term warfare is actively avoided) or "Combat-as-banditry".

Or perhaps "Combat-as-bullying", even. When one is completely uninterested in a fair, open, or honest fight, and there are no rules but those set one-sidedly, then there's certainly a lot in common with bullying (and indeed Murder-Hobos are typically bullies of the worst kind, and of the 1E PCs I've read about, easily 90% would qualify as bullies - this dropped steeply in 2E, I note - where there was more emphasis on fighting generally, as gold for XP became a mere obscure optional rule, and more focus on fights being in some way fair).

Combat-as-War is really an aggrandization of something that's much nastier and more brutish. Similarly, Combat-as-Sport is a softening of something much more dangerous. I don't see many football teams beaten to death on the field, I mean, not outside of Blood Bowl, anyway.

If you wanted to be generous, you could maybe use "Combat as SWAT", but it's not accurate, because if SWAT are outnumbered or the like, they just don't go in, and get more people. "Guerrilla Combat", maybe?

Maybe if we want to give both sides cool terms, we could call the stuff people call CaW "*Guerrilla Combat*" and stuff people call CaS "*Swashbuckling Combat*". Both have the word combat still, both have an epithet usually regarded as positive, and I think both are fairly accurately described (please let's not have a long argument about how sometimes The Three Musketeers elaborately biased stuff in their favour - they sure did - but they also frequently took huge risks and fought people seriously outnumbering them, with faith in god (at least for Aramis!), luck/fate and their own skill-at-arms - or vice versa with how sometimes guerrilla forces met others on even terms).


----------



## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Even if 4e had won the entire TTRPG market, we likely would be.



Again, a massive "if" that makes the rest of the conversation pointless.  

"If" 4E had come anywhere near simply maintaining the D&D fanbase, then it would be reasonable to discuss what would or would not have happened "if" 4E had grown that base.

Again, over and over I was assured by 4E fans that those of us leaving would be replaced many times over. (When we were not being told that our assimilation was unavoidable).  So seeing that held up as a combination impossible standard and substitute for looking at what actually happened is gratifying.


----------



## BryonD (Jul 29, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Nope. I'm meaning this pretty generally. Since your description of your game dovetails nicely with what I've said I'm frankly at a loss as to what you are on about.




Ok, so your opinion applies to every table everywhere and me saying the opposite of what you said "dovetails nicely" with what you said.

Got it.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Again, over and over I was assured by 4E fans that those of us leaving would be replaced many times over. (When we were not being told that our assimilation was unavoidable).  So seeing that held up as a combination impossible standard and substitute for looking at what actually happened is gratifying.




This is an interesting tidbit. I know I didn't tell anyone that, but I wasn't initially a "4E fan", I guess, 4E turned me into one after the fact.

What I do know is, for every 4E group I know IRL, this is actually true - for the odd person we lost (either to natural attrition, or because they didn't like 4E, or whatever), we gained a number more - including people new to RPGs entirely, or who had quit them for boardgames.

So I think on a micro scale, it was probably true. Those groups that stuck with 4E and enjoyed it (and that latter bit is important, a group having a bad time rarely attracts new players!), they gained players, so had a perception that players were being gained (a correct perception, from their perspective). Something about the board-game-y look for 4E also draws in a lot of skeptical people in a way TotM games haven't (or draws in different people, at the very least - someone who shys away from the concept of pure "I'M AN ELF! 8)"-type stuff can more easily engage if it's clear that they're playing these here dudes on the table).

Whereas a group that quit D&D entirely, going to OSR or PF or the like, probably saw only themselves (and maybe other like-minded groups), and saw pure loss.

So, subjectivity of experiences and all that. Interesting stuff, anyway!


----------



## Hussar (Jul 29, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Ok, so your opinion applies to every table everywhere and me saying the opposite of what you said "dovetails nicely" with what you said.
> 
> Got it.




Um, got what?  You said, specifically, that your group chooses to employ the rules in such a way that you have dramatic showdowns time and time and time again.  In other words, you deliberately set out to craft an interesting campaign.  Great.  But, that's not combat as war, which was my original point.  It's not random enough to be combat as war.  

Put it another way.  How many random encounters have you run in the past ten sessions?  In combat as war, you should be having random encounters very, very often - that's the point of randomness after all.  If you have very few, if any random encounters, then every encounter is a prepared one.  Or the vast majority are prepared encounters.

Which, again, is the antithesis of Combat as War.  Not random enough.  You are crafting a sport.  It could be a very difficult sport, but still a sport.  

You're running a great game.  It's just not Combat as War.  And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Or, to put it another way, in what way would you characterise your game as combat as war?  What random elements are in play?  What actions do your players consistently take to mitigate the odds?  If the players do not take actions to mitigate the odds, what is the likely outcome of a given encounter?


----------



## billd91 (Jul 29, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Um, got what?  You said, specifically, that your group chooses to employ the rules in such a way that you have dramatic showdowns time and time and time again.  In other words, you deliberately set out to craft an interesting campaign.  Great.  But, that's not combat as war, which was my original point.  It's not random enough to be combat as war.
> 
> Put it another way.  How many random encounters have you run in the past ten sessions?  In combat as war, you should be having random encounters very, very often - that's the point of randomness after all.  If you have very few, if any random encounters, then every encounter is a prepared one.  Or the vast majority are prepared encounters.
> 
> ...




I think you've really tried to push the description of Combat as War into an entirely ridiculous direction. What does the number of random encounters have to do with Combat as War again? Why would having set encounters mean that it's not Combat as War? Combat as War is really more of an attitude about solving the conflict (violent or otherwise) that encounters (whether random or set) pose and the openness to be able to put any plan that appears effective into place - even if that means upending the expectations of the encounter.

As far as the equally as weird side debate about real-world rules of warfare, it's helpful to note what those rules attempt or attempted to do - and that's control warfare on a particular ideology's terms. Ultimately, when you compare with a realist view of warfare (such as that described by Thucydides) you come to realize that rules of warfare whether based on Chivalry or Geneva Conventions mainly serve to try to turn War into Sport. And to do so on terms favorable to the more powerful actor - the strongest individual warrior, the best equipped warrior, the nation with the biggest army.


----------



## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Once again I come back to the thread, and I see that despite best efforts to actually talk about the concepts involved - and some interesting ideas - "Combat as Means and Combat as Ends" has a _lot _of potential - certain voices keep maintaining this incredibly hostile tone of derision and name-calling.  As if you don't _want _to have a civil discussion.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Once again I come back to the thread, and I see that despite best efforts to actually talk about the concepts involved - and some interesting ideas - "Combat as Means and Combat as Ends" has a _lot _of potential - certain voices keep maintaining this incredibly hostile tone of derision and name-calling.  As if you don't _want _to have a civil discussion.




A civil discussion can only _start_ when you accept that even if it wasn't what was intended, the Combat as Sport/Combat as War dichotomy is inherently uncivil.


----------



## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> A civil discussion can only _start_ when you accept that even if it wasn't what was intended, the Combat as Sport/Combat as War dichotomy is inherently uncivil.




It is not inherently uncivil; you have decided that the phrase "Combat as Sport" is somehow a slap at your game (even when you don't play that way) and react to the term with hostility.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> It is not inherently uncivil; you have decided that the phrase "Combat as Sport" is somehow a slap at your game (even when you don't play that way) and react to the term with hostility.




There is nothing wrong with "Combat as Sport" as a term.  It's the Sport/War dichotomy that's uncivil.  My problem is quite explicitly with the War side of that that's inaccurate and self-aggrandizing.


----------



## Hussar (Jul 29, 2014)

billd91 said:


> I think you've really tried to push the description of Combat as War into an entirely ridiculous direction. What does the number of random encounters have to do with Combat as War again? Why would having set encounters mean that it's not Combat as War? Combat as War is really more of an attitude about solving the conflict (violent or otherwise) that encounters (whether random or set) pose and the openness to be able to put any plan that appears effective into place - even if that means upending the expectations of the encounter.
> 
> As far as the equally as weird side debate about real-world rules of warfare, it's helpful to note what those rules attempt or attempted to do - and that's control warfare on a particular ideology's terms. Ultimately, when you compare with a realist view of warfare (such as that described by Thucydides) you come to realize that rules of warfare whether based on Chivalry or Geneva Conventions mainly serve to try to turn War into Sport. And to do so on terms favorable to the more powerful actor - the strongest individual warrior, the best equipped warrior, the nation with the biggest army.




As I understand it, Combat as War is the idea that encounters are framed in such a way that the players have to search for any number of means to resolve the combat in such a way that they have the greatest advantage possible.  Is this not correct?  Additionally, CaW includes the concept that the scenarios are largely random - that we are not scripting encounters in such a way that they become a sport, following pre-determined paths.  

It is this randomness that is supposed to make the game more interesting, is it not?  It's the unpredictable nature of the scenarios that make them Combat as War.  If the scenarios are pre-scripted, then they are very predictable, and always have been in every edition of D&D.  If the DM is crafting each encounter with an eye to how this will play out, then it's no longer CaW.

Thus, random encounters are a very integral part of CaW.  Without that random element, you might as well be playing a sport.  It's not D&D as Poker if the DM is stacking the deck in such a way that he knows where and when every encounter will occur.

On the other part, I actually agree with you.  Delving into this largely semantic wank about what "war" means isn't helping anything.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> There is nothing wrong with "Combat as Sport" as a term.  It's the Sport/War dichotomy that's uncivil.  My problem is quite explicitly with the War side of that that's inaccurate and self-aggrandizing.




Your use of the phrase "self-aggrandizing" demonstrates my point.  You are projecting an emotional justification onto the side you oppose.

Stick with arguing "inaccurate" and you'd be better off.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Your use of the phrase "self-aggrandizing" demonstrates my point.  You are projecting an emotional justification onto the side you oppose.
> 
> Stick with arguing "inaccurate" and you'd be better off.




I might be prepared to back down to "condescending" which the dichotomy certainly is.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Your use of the phrase "self-aggrandizing" demonstrates my point.  You are projecting an emotional justification onto the side you oppose.
> 
> Stick with arguing "inaccurate" and you'd be better off.




I've shown how inaccurate it is at some length, but you seem to have ignored that entirely.


----------



## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> I might be prepared to back down to "condescending" which the dichotomy certainly is.




Instead of backing down - why don't you try saying something like "I feel the term Combat as War is inherently condescending/self-aggrandizing" and explain why?  Then people can actually discuss what you think is wrong with it.  Assertion is not argument, he asserts.

Like so many of these kind of discussions, the negative reaction some posters have for the idea under debate gets immediately ascribed to malice or animus on the part of the original poster.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Like so many of these kind of discussions, the negative reaction some posters have for the idea under debate gets immediately ascribed to malice or animus on the part of the original poster.




That's a hypocritical position, though, Savage, and I mean that in a non-hostile way, just that it is. You're ascribing negative motives to others without proof because you believe they ascribe negative motivations to others without proof. 

I mean, does more need to be said on how inaccurate combat-as-war is? It's very inaccurate. Combat-as-sport is pretty inaccurate too. Both push the terms to extreme positions, too, which as I've discussed, are unhelpful to a reasoned discussion.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Instead of backing down - why don't you try saying something like "I feel the term Combat as War is inherently condescending/self-aggrandizing" and explain why?  Then people can actually discuss what you think is wrong with it.  Assertion is not argument, he asserts.
> 
> Like so many of these kind of discussions, the negative reaction some posters have for the idea under debate gets immediately ascribed to malice or animus on the part of the original poster.




To put it simply the message is "We are Real Men who are Really Hard and what we do is WAR and our balls hang low.  Not like you little kids who are only playing at fighting on the sports field."

War vs Sports is an inherent mismatch in terms of seriousness.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I mean, does more need to be said on how inaccurate combat-as-war is? It's very inaccurate. Combat-as-sport is pretty inaccurate too. Both push the terms to extreme positions, too, which as I've discussed, are unhelpful to a reasoned discussion.




A lot of inaccurate, extreme definitions can be useful to label aspects of more nuanced behavior.  But it's OK to discuss the inaccuracy of the term; I object to the claims that it's inherently divisive.  The original poster, and most of the people I read discussing the terms, did not claim that one side was inferior to the other, simply that they liked one side better and why.  Major Oakheart, for example, did a marvelous job explaining why he disliked CaW without the aggrieved victim tone.


----------



## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> To put it simply the message is "We are Real Men who are Really Hard and what we do is WAR and our balls hang low.  Not like you little kids who are only playing at fighting on the sports field."
> 
> War vs Sports is an inherent mismatch in terms of seriousness.




And see, that's NOT the message.  That's what YOU are reading into it.  You are inferring that the terms were chosen to make one side seem more manly, which I see no evidence of.

Because no matter where you fall on the line, we all know this is still just a game.

If you said "I don't like the terms 'War' and 'Sport' because I feel the first word is inherently more serious than the other" - that would be a valid argument to discuss.  Your phrasing above is more of an attack on the OP.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> A lot of inaccurate, extreme definitions can be useful to label aspects of more nuanced behavior.  But it's OK to discuss the inaccuracy of the term; I object to the claims that it's inherently divisive.  The original poster, and most of the people I read discussing the terms, did not claim that one side was inferior to the other, simply that they liked one side better and why.  Major Oakheart, for example, did a marvelous job explaining why he disliked CaW without the* aggrieved victim tone*.




You can't complain about people using "emotional terms", then use them yourself, Savage. It's hypocritical and obviously unhelpful. You say "as if they didn't want a civil discussion", but when you complain about "emotional terms", then use them, that's obviously not being completely civil.

Also, if you object to the claims that the term is "inherently divisive", does that mean you are absolutely unwilling to listen to such claims? It rather sounds like it.

If you insist that we must discuss things on your terms, use emotional language after decrying it, and refuse to even countenance the possibility that terms you've offered are not helpful, then that's really problematic, I must say.

Frustrating, too, because I'd like to discuss the actual issues, but you seem more interested insisting that we use specific terms that don't really seem to help with discussing the issues.


----------



## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> You can't complain about people using "emotional terms", then use them yourself, Savage. It's hypocritical and obviously unhelpful. You say "as if they didn't want a civil discussion", but when you complain about "emotional terms", then use them, that's obviously not being completely civil.




Excuse me for getting frustrated having the same argument repeatedly.



Ruin Explorer said:


> Also, if you object to the claims that the term is "inherently divisive", does that mean you are absolutely unwilling to listen to such claims? It rather sounds like it.




No, it doesn't sound like it.  The key term is "inherently".  I have no problem with someone explaining why they think the terms are divisive - but instead I am faced with unsubstantiated assertions and attacks on the OP.



Ruin Explorer said:


> If you insist that we must discuss things on your terms, use emotional language after decrying it, and refuse to even countenance the possibility that terms you've offered are not helpful, then that's really problematic, I must say.  Frustrating, too, because I'd like to discuss the actual issues, but you seem more interested insisting that we use specific terms that don't really seem to help with discussing the issues.




Feel free to discuss the actual issues.  But this post is simply a criticism of me for arguing with another poster.  Should I post the Argument Clinic video now?


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> And see, that's NOT the message.  That's what YOU are reading into it.  You are inferring that the terms were chosen to make one side seem more manly, which I see no evidence of.




This is you reading things into what I am saying _that explicitly contradict what I have said on this thread._  There is a difference between trying to figure something out with terms you think fit (as was done initially) as working terms that aren't ideal, and waving banners around.

I have no problem with the initial choice of terms.  It was, as I have said, trying to think something through.  But they should have been left on that thread.



> If you said "I don't like the terms 'War' and 'Sport' because I feel the first word is inherently more serious than the other" - that would be a valid argument to discuss.  Your phrasing above is more of an attack on the OP.




OK.  My position is that the dichotomy is both inaccurate and condescending.

If we want more accuracy, a desire for mismatched fights should replace Combat as War with Combat as Bullying - and a desire for any means necessary including destruction of habitats, burning down forests, and collapsing dungeons, when undertaken by a small cell of people, isn't Combat as War so much as Combat as Terrorism.

It's condescending and inflammatory because of the gap in seriousness.

Both need dealing with if the term is to be useful for anything desirable rather than as a banner in the edition wars.  And although the insight of strategic vs tactical play is useful using terms that are simultaneously inaccurate and insulting is going to get you nowhere useful.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Excuse me for getting frustrated having the same argument repeatedly.




So you're allowed to get frustrated with having this argument repeatedly, but the people who are being condescended to with this argument aren't?



> No, it doesn't sound like it.  The key term is "inherently".  I have no problem with someone explaining why they think the terms are divisive - but instead I am faced with unsubstantiated assertions and attacks on the OP.




I've explained before.  And please retract your claim about attacks on the OP.  The problem isn't the OP - it's people then waving that post around like a banner.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Excuse me for getting frustrated having the same argument repeatedly.




You are of course excused, but you must excuse others for the same, if you don't, you can't have the civil discussion we both want!



Savage Wombat said:


> No, it doesn't sound like it.  The key term is "inherently".  I have no problem with someone explaining why they think the terms are divisive - but instead I am faced with unsubstantiated assertions and attacks on the OP.




Sorry, "sounds like it to me", not "sounds like it", is what I should have said! It's been explained why it's divisive and inaccurate at length, but you seem to want to continue to use it anyway.



Savage Wombat said:


> Feel free to discuss the actual issues.  But this post is simply a criticism of me for arguing with another poster.  Should I post the Argument Clinic video now?




You are criticising others for how they argue. I am pointing out that, from my perspective, you appear to be engaging in similar behaviour. That doesn't seem like unreasonable behaviour to me. Does it to you?

The actual issue, as I discussed in a large post a little back, is that CaW is very inaccurate, because, at the most generous, "Guerrilla Combat" might be a better term, or perhaps "Ambush Combat". War is inaccurate on many levels, but I don't think that needs repeating. I can link to the post if you missed it. I don't feel there's much point discussing the issues if CaW/CaS are going to be used, because the argument will just, imo, repeatedly devolve into discussions around those terms - and I don't mean just "that terms sucks" stuff, I mean assumptions based on those terms which lead to dead ends - CaW and CaS both cause this, because they're so extreme.

It's not a black/white issue, it's not a dichotomy, it's not either/or. It's an issue where most people, RPGs, and systems occupy the middle ground, and the interplay between "Guerrilla Combat" and "Swashbuckling Combat" is quite a fascinating one (whereas CaS and CaW are so extreme that I think it's hard to say that they have any interplay).


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> This is you reading things into what I am saying _that explicitly contradict what I have said on this thread._  There is a difference between trying to figure something out with terms you think fit (as was done initially) as working terms that aren't ideal, and waving banners around.




I'm not the one who used the phrase "my balls hang low".  And I haven't been waving banners for anything other than that I think the dichotomy (though I've been told that term is inaccurate) has validity.




Neonchameleon said:


> OK.  My position is that the dichotomy is both inaccurate and condescending.
> 
> If we want more accuracy, a desire for mismatched fights should replace Combat as War with Combat as Bullying - and a desire for any means necessary including destruction of habitats, burning down forests, and collapsing dungeons, when undertaken by a small cell of people, isn't Combat as War so much as Combat as Terrorism.
> 
> ...




See, this I can deal with better.

I feel that labeling "Combat as War" as meaning "a desire for mismatched fights" is misleading.  It's using a part of the concept to describe the whole.  And furthermore, I think that describing this as such implies that the argument is over balanced encounters, which can then be used to "imply" criticism of certain editions.

What if we left combat out of it entirely?  What if CaW is equivalent to Hussar trying to ride giant centipedes through the desert to avoid unnecessary combat encounters?  Nothing's being blown up or slaughtered, but the point is the same.


----------



## Iosue (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> I might be prepared to back down to "condescending" which the dichotomy certainly is.



Please.  In the condescension and inherently uncivil categories, CaW/CaS can't even get in the same room as "mother may I" and "murderhoboes".  And that's not even getting into the patently ridiculous "combat as bullying" and "combat as terrorism" claims.


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I'm not the one who used the phrase "my balls hang low".  And I haven't been waving banners for anything other than that I think the dichotomy (though I've been told that term is inaccurate) has validity.




Of course you haven't.  On the other hand using army marching songs to illustrate the implications of describing things as war is, I believe, either fair or polite to the war side.



> See, this I can deal with better.
> 
> I feel that labeling "Combat as War" as meaning "a desire for mismatched fights" is misleading.  It's using a part of the concept to describe the whole.




An inherent part of the concept every time I've heard CaW supported.  And you're ducking entirely the "Burn down the forest and turn the dungeon to mud" parts of CaW.



> What if we left combat out of it entirely?  What if CaW is equivalent to Hussar trying to ride giant centipedes through the desert to avoid unnecessary combat encounters?  Nothing's being blown up or slaughtered, but the point is the same.




Then I'd say CaW is a 4e staple and much harder in 3.X and AD&D.

But if we want an Action Film/Heist Film dichotomy I think that works?


----------



## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Iosue said:


> Please.  In the condescension and inherently uncivil categories, CaW/CaS can't even get in the same room as "mother may I" and "murderhoboes".




Those have the virtue of being accurate.  And are much more polite than any claim that a game is WoW - or anything other than a tabletop RPG.



> And that's not even getting into the patently ridiculous "combat as bullying" and "combat as terrorism" claims.




So let me check.  You're saying that a small band of heavily armed (non-government if it matters) people melting the building a lot of people live in and destroying them by destroying the building _isn't_ terrorism? Because it's what Savage Wombat is advocating.  And you're saying that a small band of (again non-governmental) people burning down where others live to eliminate them also isn't terrorism?  Because again Savage Wombat is using exactly that as an example of CaW on this thread.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Let me try this example.

Gary is running Tomb of Horrors.  One of the players, Robilar, deals with every trap in the whole dungeon (more or less) by throwing orc henchman at them.

Robilar thinks this is smart play, and the DM appears to agree because he's allowing it.

Another player (who I have to make up) thinks this is boring play, with none of the excitement he was expecting from a creepy tomb.

Are these not two very different play styles?  Styles that are in tension?  

If such a difference in play styles exists, it is useful to come up with terms to describe the styles, so that one player can explain why he liked or disliked the game.

The identification of the difference in styles does not imply that a particular game, player, or ruleset is forced into one category or the other.  Simply that they are very different approaches.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Those have the virtue of being accurate.  And are much more polite than any claim that a game is WoW - or anything other than a tabletop RPG.




The fact that you think that is part of the problem, I fear.



Neonchameleon said:


> So let me check.  You're saying that a small band of heavily armed (non-government if it matters) people melting the building a lot of people live in and destroying them by destroying the building _isn't_ terrorism? Because it's what Savage Wombat is advocating.  And you're saying that a small band of (again non-governmental) people burning down where others live to eliminate them also isn't terrorism?  Because again Savage Wombat is using exactly that as an example of CaW on this thread.




I haven't *advocated *anything.  I'm discussing two different play styles.  If you read back, I've even said I don't play that way.

 [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION] - this is what I mean.  He's not arguing with what I've said, he's arguing with what he decided I meant.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> The fact that you think that is part of the problem, I fear.




That I think which part?



> I haven't *advocated *anything.  I'm discussing two different play styles.  If you read back, I've even said I don't play that way.




So the illustrations you were using for CaW were examples of terrorism.  Is this your case?


----------



## Hussar (Jul 29, 2014)

Sure, they might be different approaches, since play preferences obviously differ.  But, your point about the Dm allowing things is why I have a problem with the dichotomy you are presenting.  If it's down to what the DM allows, then there really isn't any difference, they're both sports.  Neither is about the player choosing option A or B, it's about what the DM will enable.  And since it's basically all down to that, what's the point in painting them differently?

At the end of the day, it's all contrived scenarios.  It's artifice.  Hopefully what the Dm wants to see and what the player's want to attempt line up and everyone goes home happy with a fun session.  When they don't line up, everyone is pissed off.  But, painting the two lines as opposites is covering up the fact that they are much, much closer than far apart.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I haven't *advocated *anything.  I'm discussing two different play styles.  If you read back, I've even said I don't play that way.
> 
> [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION] - this is what I mean.  He's not arguing with what I've said, he's arguing with what he decided I meant.




Hey, keep me out of this!  What I'm interested in is finding better terms so we can actually discuss stuff. Didn't you come up with some earlier? Like one of the was "Resource Management" or something? I mean, that's what Robilar is doing - he's managing resources (presumably weighing the price of insane/mind-controlled orcs, in terms of GP or spells used or whatever, against the risk of traps, and whether getting said orcs killed actually shows how the trap works).


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> So the illustrations you were using for CaW were examples of terrorism.  Is this your case?




I describe two different styles of game play.  I'm saying nothing about whether one is better than the other.

If you are saying that "CaW is bad game-play because it encourages acts that could be described as terrorism" please do so.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Hey, keep me out of this!  What I'm interested in is finding better terms so we can actually discuss stuff. Didn't you come up with some earlier? Like one of the was "Resource Management" or something? I mean, that's what Robilar is doing - he's managing resources (presumably weighing the price of insane/mind-controlled orcs, in terms of GP or spells used or whatever, against the risk of traps, and whether getting said orcs killed actually shows how the trap works).




Someone did, certainly.  Possibly back in the original thread.

I thought the "Combat as Means" vs. "Combat as Ends" had merit, though it doesn't describe quite the same thing.  It's still possible that what I'm seeing has to do with [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's "scene reframing" thing.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I describe two different styles of game play.  I'm saying nothing about whether one is better than the other.
> 
> If you are saying that "CaW is bad game-play because it encourages acts that could be described as terrorism" please do so.




I'm not.  I'm saying "When we look at your illustrations, terrorism is a much more accurate term for  what you are claiming one side is than war."

If you can claim that there's no condescension in war because it's an accurate term, then if terrorism is more accurate (as it is) then switching to Combat as Terrorism should be fine.

I've suggested strategic/tactical focus and I've suggested Action Movie/Heist Movie as better and less troublesome ways of expressing what you are trying to get at.


----------



## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> I've suggested strategic/tactical focus and I've suggested Action Movie/Heist Movie as better and less troublesome ways of expressing what you are trying to get at.




I'm not convinced strategic/tactical focus accurately describes the difference.  I'm still considering Action Movie/Heist Movie, which has potential.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Someone did, certainly.  Possibly back in the original thread.
> 
> I thought the "Combat as Means" vs. "Combat as Ends" had merit, though it doesn't describe quite the same thing.  It's still possible that what I'm seeing has to do with [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's "scene reframing" thing.




But you did suggest removing combat from the terms, right?

I think that's a very good idea. One would also remove War/Sport, because they pertain to combat, but I think one thing EVERYONE agrees on is that this issue isn't _just_ about combat or the avoidance/biasing thereof.

Action Movie/Heist Movie is fairly accurate, but it's kind of funny, because people always claim (positively and negatively!) that 4E is "Action Movie" style, but my 4E game could not be much more "Heist Movie"!  I mean, with action scenes, but most Heist Movies have the odd one of those!


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Action Movie/Heist Movie is fairly accurate, but it's kind of funny, because people always claim (positively and negatively!) that 4E is "Action Movie" style, but my 4E game could not be much more "Heist Movie"!  I mean, with action scenes, but most Heist Movies have the odd one of those!




Heh.  The last two 4e games I ran were heist movies with action scenes as well 

I also suspect that there's something in a Sandbox/Adventure Path dichotomy.

Edit: Indeed I find heists work better if you keep the magic relatively low - you're actually subverting the issues rather than snapping your fingers and rendering them irrelevant.  And it's 3.0, 3.5, and PF I wouldn't care to run heists in.  Magic is just too powerful (AD&D strictly limited it and 4e makes it not _that_ strong).


----------



## Daztur (Jul 29, 2014)

I really liked the ideas that @_*Libramarian*_ talked about in post #167. Good stuff there.



pemerton said:


> I'd be interested in any comments on post 164, and/or the episodes of play that are linked to.




OK.

I’m having a hard time following the details of what went on because of the amount of 4ed-specific terminology. Both of my 4ed characters were heroic tier fighters and if you get much beyond that my knowledge gets a lot spottier.

From what I can follow that seems like some good examples of smart play. The set-up for Torog’s appearance sounds like CaW play, while there are also a lot of examples of solid CaS tactics. In general I love combat that takes place around interesting and unique terrain as it can shove players out of their comfort zone. While 4ed tends to cater to CaS more than CaW in the original CaS/CaW thread I heard too many story about 4ed players using tactics that would make the Black Company proud (including some with weird combinations of magic items that lead to the players winning a fight without making a single attack roll to make me think that you can’t CaW the hell out of 4ed.

One aspect of 4ed skills that are on display here that I don’t like is how open-ended the skills are. I prefer skill systems that nail down really precisely what skills can do in narrative terms (ACKS proficiencies do this well despite being a bit blander than I’d like) so players can plan around what their skills can do. However, just about every RPG out there has very open-ended skills, including lots of old school as all hell games, so nothing specific to 4ed there.

I really like what 1ed D&D does with spells in that it really nails down exactly what the spells are doing in narrative terms (especially with the addendum in the DMG) so it’s easy for the DM to adjudicate the PCs doing clever things. For example I want to know exactly HOW the succumbus is going to screw with the PCs’ heads. Kiss (full helm!)? Voice (wax in ears!)? Telepathy (break out the lead sheets!). That sort of thing.

A lot of 4ed abilities don’t really do that, they give you the consequences of a power being used without giving me a clear idea of exactly what’s happening to do that, which makes it hard to use those abilities off-label, but then you can say the same about a lot of 0ed spells so that’s not really specific to 4ed either.



Neonchameleon said:


> Because you were saying that Combat as War people liked options. When you look at the AD&D fighter there _aren't_ mechanical options. You can't even easily change your weapons. Which means that the AD&D fighter should be the exemplar of the class you hate the most. From which I can conclude that either
> a: You think that CaW should only be undertaken by spellcasters
> b: This isn't actually a consideration and CaW is just a battle flag.




Often lack of options helps get the creativity going. I’ve run a lot of D&D with students over the years and I just don’t have time to teach them the rules so I hand them pre-gens, give them a 5 minute spiel, field questions and help them select spells for 5 minutes and then they’re at the door of the dungeon.

They don’t know what their options are. The fighters don’t know there are just rules to hit stuff. The thieves don’t know what their thief skills are (I just put “you’re good at doing sneaky stuff like a thief”). Because they don’t have any real options on their character sheet they instead have to look at the environment and manipulate it, which sparks a lot of creativity.

On the other hand it helps to have SOMETHING to work with. I’ve had far better results with “you’re a dude with a sword, ten foot pole and a cow” than “you’re a dude with a sword.” And yeah, this is where 1ed fighters get a bit short changed as you point out. When you get to high level the CaW tactics start focusing more and more on spells (poor fighters) and magic items (equally shared) which leaves them a bit out in the cold, which is something that wouldn’t happen in my theoretical ideal D&D edition.



> More like "we want cheap curb stomps of the enemy and would yowl to high heaven if high level NPC mages were to take CaW seriously and start scrying for bands of adventurers and then sticking up wanted posters with rewards once they hit third level".




Depends. One of my favorite campaigns was a Ravenloft one in which the DM managed to enforce Murphey’s Law in such a way that half of the sessions ended with us thinking “oh God, what a mess we made of everything, it was all our fault.”

But even if the CaW is completely one sided, curb stomping stupid NPCs CaW can be just as fun as curb stomping them CaS style (using perfect tactics against dumb NPCs) and high-fiving each other. Don’t think enjoying beating NPCs and hating when they beat you is exclusive to any one playstyle 



Ruin Explorer said:


> What I've seen way too many times in D&D is:
> 
> A) In 1/2E - Good planning, good play, bad rolls so TPK anyway. I just don't get how this is supposed to be fun. It sucks. Everyone's game is over because the designers set up a game which is really swing-y with lots of instant death.
> 
> B) In 3.XE - Good planning, good play, bad rolls means one PC is effectively useless for an entire combat (almost never seen this in 4E because of the narrower ranges involved and the fact that you can usually choose to target NADs or the like).




For the 1/2ed one, if you’re guaranteed victory for having good planning and good play then that leeches out some of the gambling-style excitement. For example in poker you can have calculated the stats perfectly and still get beaten anyway, which is part of what makes the game fun.

For the 3ed one. Been then, seen that, poor poor poor scout/rogue.



Neonchameleon said:


> Actually, I've just worked out why the playstyle claimed by the advocates of so-called Combat as War sticks in my throat so badly.
> 
> On the one side you have a large, powerful, and slow to react force. That is expected to play in a manner that is approximately fair because otherwise it could wipe out the individuals concerned. On the other hand you have a small and well armed but tiny force trying to win by any means necessary where any means necessary explicitly mentioned (in this thread alone) includes collapsing living quarters and burning down the entire forest the enemies live in.
> 
> This isn't warfare. Warfare almost invariably has rules like the Geneva Convention - or the rule that once a breach has been made you surrender. Collapsing dungeons and burning down forests puts you well into the realms of Terrorism.




Good point. Maybe Combat as Duel vs. Combat as Terrorism would’ve been better? The reason I chose “Combat as Sport” as the term was because of conversation on Tobold’s blog (tobolds.blogspot.com) a looooooong while back about MMORPGs in which he said that he liked battlefields because they were like a game of soccer (even playing field etc. etc.) while open world PvP in MMORPGs was too much like war and war isn’t fun. I just translated the thinking over to PnP RPGs.

Guerilla combat vs. swashbuckling combat works too. There’s a reason why I chose the Princess Bride duel for the CaS example to go along with Indy shoots the guy with the sword as the CaW example.

Ooof, this threads too long. Three more pages and I should’ve gone to bed half an hour ago.

Anyway, one last thought, after thinking over some stuff in reaction to this thread I’m going to try to come at this from another angle: basically looking at things from the point of view of task resolution instead of overall play style.


----------



## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> So let me check.  You're saying that a small band of heavily armed (non-government if it matters) people melting the building a lot of people live in and destroying them by destroying the building _isn't_ terrorism? Because it's what Savage Wombat is advocating.  And you're saying that a small band of (again non-governmental) people burning down where others live to eliminate them also isn't terrorism?  Because again Savage Wombat is using exactly that as an example of CaW on this thread.



 I've heard terrorism defined as the illegal use of violence to effect political change.  

Political change is rarely the goal of adventurers.  'Banditry' would probably be a more accurate term, more in keeping with the vaguely medieval setting.



BryonD said:


> "If" 4E had come anywhere near simply maintaining the D&D fanbase, then it would be reasonable to discuss what would or would not have happened "if" 4E had grown that base.



 I get what you're trying to say.  You want to believe that 4e 'failed' because you and others like you rejected it.  It's an empowering thing to believe.  But, the only thing you have to support that is the fact that had a short run.  You can't point to data that say it sold less than other editions - in fact, the little data available suggests that it sold quite well.  An insider admitted, years ago, what kind of goals were set for 4e, and the fact that it 'failed' merely shows that it didn't meet those goals.  We also have some indication as to why, though it's an unpleasant topic of conversation, the upshot being that development of DDI was never completed.

And, yes, 4e almost certainly did grow the base - it didn't actually chase anyone away from the hobby (they only ran as far as Pathfinder) and it did attract and retain new players (IMX, 4e retained new players better than any edition I'd ever used to introduce people to the hobby).  

Ruin Explorer made a good point about that.  If you adopted 4e, you might have encountered new players - in my case, it was via the Encounters program and local conventions, and see how easy it was for them to learn 4e.  It was surprising to see new players quickly pick up a game that presented some hurdles for you or your group, because you were 'un-learning' tricks you'd long used to cope with the game's issues, while new players were free of that baggage.  If you were a non-adopter, you retreated into an established circle of players who, like you, favored a given past edition.  You were less likely to encounter new players.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Again, you do not support your argument that a strawman is involved, or that the dichotomy is false.



 The assertion of theories like this is that there are only two playstyles.  That there is more than one such theory is ample proof that they're all wrong on that particular.



Savage Wombat said:


> Tony Vargas said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



 Not /all/ that it is, but certainly something it's OK with.

Or, maybe that's exactly what it is:


Daztur said:


> As far as CaW being cheating. Yup, that's exactly what it is. A lot of classic CaW maneuvers are basically the same thing as computer game exploits which sucks in PvP play but can be great fun if the only ones getting the raw end of the exploits are NPCs.






Savage Wombat said:


> 1.  People have said that 4e is strongly dedicated to CaS in contrast to CaW.  That does not mean that one is equivalent to the other.  The existence of the phrase "Combat as Sport" is not intended as a slap at 4e.  (Portions of the article do suggest the writer's distaste for 4e - that's not the same thing as the core topic of the article.)



 In effect, CaS is a stand-in for 4e or the 4e-defending trenches in the edition war.  So much of the theorizing such as you see in this thread's OP and in CaW/CaS and other theories like it is just rationalization for some not-necessarily-rational preference.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 29, 2014)

Does this example work:

In the Action Movie paradigm, the target has a security system.  The players are expected to fight/sneak/talk their way to the station where the system can be deactivated, or just deal with the consequences of the system being on.

In the Heist Movie paradigm, one player says "instead, let's just go steal an electromagnetic pulse bomb from a nearby research lab and knock the entire grid out for several seconds".

Criticisms?  Tweaks?


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 29, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Does this example work:
> 
> In the Action Movie paradigm, the target has a security system.  The players are expected to fight/sneak/talk their way to the station where the system can be deactivated, or just deal with the consequences of the system being on.
> 
> ...




The irony there is that the two genres would appear to be backwards.  "Drop a _really_ big hammer on it and don't worry about collateral damage" is a staple of the action movie, while in a heist movie you talk/sneak/fight your way in while not having shatteringly large effects, or deal with the consequences.


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## Aenghus (Jul 29, 2014)

In the Action Movie paradigm the plot tends to be stated up front, transparent and typically isn't messed with. It tends to be "Bring down the BBEG" with a side order of "Save the Hostage" and "Now it's personal". Action Movie logic is in effect, specifically that "Action is Effective" and beating up bad guys and blowing up stuff leads to victory. A final direct confrontation with the BBEG is guaranteed even if it doesn't make sense by strict logic.

The Heist Movie paradigm is "Get the maguffin by any means deemed acceptable and escape" with  a sideorder of "We're all crooks here" and "Something always goes wrong.". Twists are very common in heist movies. The plans are often overcomplex with multiple points of failure, and are designed to be entertaining to watch more than effective. The boring bits like hiding for eight hours in a box tend to be skipped. Intra-party conflict and treachery is a common feature.

I think the underlying argument here is about aesthetics and taste. In the former should they survive the party are guaranteed a face to face confrontation with the BBEG, and probably a monologue, followed by a dramatic showdown. In the latter a hostile encounter with the mark is a potential failure condition and generally something to avoid.

I'm trying to come up with a third paradigm. Maybe the AntiHero Movie  paradigm, where the winner is whoever is willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary to gain victory, regardless of the cost to themselves or others. "Victory requires gettin dirty", "There is no honour" and "No good deed goes unpunished". In this paradigm a personal confrontation with  the BBEG is something to be avoided, you want to kill him as safely and efficiently as possible. The only problem with nuking the BBEGs palace from a safe distance is gaining proof of death and to hell with collateral damage.

Maybe an acceptable dichotomy is "Planning is the best route to victory" vs "Planning is a waste of valuable playing time". I've seen players with attitudes re this topic across the entire spectrum, and the extremes  don't mix well.


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## Libramarian (Jul 29, 2014)

Ruin Explorer said:


> This is interesting, because, as a DM, I absolutely hate that. The players are my friends, and when they suffer, I feel bad (even if they aren't my friends, as humans, I don't enjoy their suffering). If they do something dumb or nasty and consequences slap them in the face, that's great, or if they're being lazy and assumptive, I don't mind them getting walloped. But if they are genuinely trying, if they are putting their all into it, then I feel nothing but vague guilt and sorrow at them suffering. So I particularly loathe the gambling element of 1/2E, where you could do everything right and still lose easily because the dice disliked you.
> 
> I mean, I have and will TPK a party who play like morons, or decide to stick with an obviously losing strategy out of stubborn-ness or the like, but I want that to be in part my decision, in part theirs, not really "Whoops that's a lot of natural 20s!", which caused a number of TPKs in my early AD&D days (and lead to me starting to roll behind a screen and fudge).



I want to see my friends do well and be happy in life and love but when it's gaming time I want to see the joy of victory and the agony of a natural 1. I actually think of myself as a softie in the sense that I don't like to be the one turning the screws, most of the time. I want the game to do that. I'm not a "killer DM". My preference is to be an uncertain, but prone towards positive DM running a killer game.



> I like these terms, but like, I've never seen a party trend really strongly towards one or the other. My experience in 4E is that there's a lot of risk management. Example: party wanted to clear out some cultists from the sewers in a city, because they wanted to use the sewers as an escape route later (it's a long story!). The cultist-clearing wasn't an objective they were hired for or anything. So rather than risk their hides fighting the cultists (despite this being 4E and there being this supposed expectation that all fights are safe/sport, an expectation I guess I must have successfully subverted), they wrangled an elaborate situation which caused the city guard to fight the cultists for them. Extreme risk management! The key player behind this has never played an RPG but 4E, either.



It's important not to get hung up on the fictional events rather than how risky it actually feels at the table. One of the greatest insights of GNS theory IMO is that a given transcript of fictional events could have been produced by any creative agenda. The fact that your players contrived a plan to have guards fight the cultists doesn't tell me how much tension was involved in that choice and whether they're really scrapping for advantage or it was more of a lighter, just for fun/showing off thing. I want real, player-level fear and apprehension (While being good sports and us all recognizing that this is just a game of course. The way I describe this is making me sound like I force the players to play for my own amusement.)

Another game I was thinking of as an example of the "efficiency optimization" style is SimCity or The Sims. When I play those games I actually hate the random disasters and try to turn those off as much as possible so I can just relax and explore how the game works and gradually advance my city/person. I understand the pleasure of this but as I said in the Rob Schwalb blog post thread I don't like this in a multi-player game because it's remarkably boring to watch someone having this type of fun.


pemerton said:


> I think I'm a bit softer than Libramarian, but I  definitely see where that approach is coming from. I feel sorry for my  players when they go for a big set-up and then someone rolls a 1. But I  also laugh (or at least giggle - and sometimes taunt).
> 
> It's especially amusing when it's the sorcerer's player who rolls a 1.  As a chaos mage, he pushes everyone within 5 sq 1 sq on a 1 (and at our  table I, as GM, decide where they get pushed to). In a recent session,  the roll of a 1 knocked Vecna over the side of an earthmote, just after  they had come up with a plan that relied on holding Vecna in place. It  was funny!




That's definitely lighter than my game, but yes, the same sort of thing.  I should say that when the player left the  room after their character died last time it was understood that they were a good sport about it and leaving the room was partly a performance to make the event even more amusing  for the rest of us. That one just  hurt because he was the last of the "original six" and had almost made  it to level 4.


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## pemerton (Jul 30, 2014)

Libramarian said:


> It's important not to get hung up on the fictional events rather than how risky it actually feels at the table. One of the greatest insights of GNS theory IMO is that a given transcript of fictional events could have been produced by any creative agenda. The fact that your players contrived a plan to have guards fight the cultists doesn't tell me how much tension was involved in that choice and whether they're really scrapping for advantage or it was more of a lighter, just for fun/showing off thing.



Absolutely this.

Likewise with the "any means necessary" style of play - if ticking off orc henchmen is no different from ticking off arrows in a quiver than Robilar's conquest of the ToH, while perhaps distasteful, is nothing very special in comparison to a 4e wizard solving a problem with rituals while the player dutifuly marks off the components used.



Savage Wombat said:


> In the Action Movie paradigm, the target has a security system.  The players are expected to fight/sneak/talk their way to the station where the system can be deactivated, or just deal with the consequences of the system being on.
> 
> In the Heist Movie paradigm, one player says "instead, let's just go steal an electromagnetic pulse bomb from a nearby research lab and knock the entire grid out for several seconds".



This is all about the ingame fiction. It doesn't tell me anything about playstyle.

For instance, if the game was HeroQuest revised, or Burning Wheel, then both hacking through the security system, and stealing a bomb to knock out the grid, might be resolved with a single check. (If framed by the GM as simple contests.)

In a 4e skill challenge, it is taken for granted (by me as a player/GM, but also I think in the rulebooks) that the players will try to leverage and twist the fiction so that they can bring their PCs' best skills to bear. In my Torog example, for instance (linked above), you see the sorcerer using his magical fire spell to melt the ice, thereby leveraging Arcana skill. (Whereas a natural fire would leverage the PC's noticeably weaker Nature skill.) Likewise the ranger flies on his carpet (leveraging an excellent Acrobatics skill) rather than running across-country (the PC's Athletics is mediocre), and vice versa for the fighter.

Looked at through this lens, what I see in your example is that Team A have stronger stealth/bluff, while Team B have stronger break & enter/demolitions - so each team is playing to its strengths.

The only approach to RPGing that doesn't permit this sort of play - that is, players leveraging the fiction to deploy their best resources - is railroading/Adventure Path play. (I disagreed upthread with  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] that this was what Pulsipher is getting at with ID vs WF, but it might be apposite for trying to make sense of this CaW/CaS thing.)



Savage Wombat said:


> Gary is running Tomb of Horrors.  One of the players, Robilar, deals with every trap in the whole dungeon (more or less) by throwing orc henchman at them.
> 
> Robilar thinks this is smart play, and the DM appears to agree because he's allowing it.
> 
> ...



There are multiple things going on here.

One is about resolution techniques. In Robilar's case, the GM is "saying yes". The GM could, presumably, turn this into an exciting game of psycho-social tension among the cadres of orcs. (For instance, Gygax's DMG has rules for loyalty checks that would be relevant in these circumstances.) But for whatever reason has chosen not to.

A game could be resolved in just the same way without the orcs - for instance, replace the orcs with a standard procedure involving 10' poles, a flying thief on a rope with lots of Wish spells for resurrection, etc.

Another is about the fictional stakes of the game. The player who finds the whole thing boring was looking for a game about dramatic tomb-looting (Indiana Jones style? or something pulpy like that.) And has instead received a game of resource management in which it could just as easily be about supplying drinks to customers in an inn as feeding orcs to traps in the ToH.

There are other ways in which the differences in desires could be described, too.

But I'm baffled as to why anyone would think that "combat as war" and "combat as sport" are useful ways of drawing any of these contrasts.



Hussar said:


> your point about the Dm allowing things is why I have a problem with the dichotomy you are presenting.  If it's down to what the DM allows, then there really isn't any difference, they're both sports.  Neither is about the player choosing option A or B, it's about what the DM will enable.  And since it's basically all down to that, what's the point in painting them differently?
> 
> At the end of the day, it's all contrived scenarios.  It's artifice.  Hopefully what the Dm wants to see and what the player's want to attempt line up and everyone goes home happy with a fun session.



I definitely think this is part of it. What sort of colour/flavour do we want? (Orc slaves? Tombs? Heist? Blowing things up?)

Who frames (and reframes) scenes - GM or players?

What sort of resolution system do we want (resource management? high gamble, like SoD, or low gamble, like 4e? etc)

How important is fictional positioning to resolution?

These are all interesting aspects of RPG design and play, but I don't see any particular connection to war or to sport. As Hussar says, the whole game is artifice, and we're talking about the ways in which it is to be undertaken.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Does this example work:
> 
> In the Action Movie paradigm, the target has a security system.  The players are expected to fight/sneak/talk their way to the station where the system can be deactivated, or just deal with the consequences of the system being on.
> 
> ...




Hmm... On thinking about it, all the examples you have given (burn down the forest, melt the dungeon, EMP the city block) make the PCs into Joker (as in The Dark Knight) style villains.  Even Hans Gruber didn't try EMPing a city block when he wanted the generator turned off.  Instead he got a step ahead of the opposition by reading their playbook and made the moves that would convince _them_ to turn the generator off for him.  When you are playing someone who is a level _more_ callous than Hans Gruber you're certainly ... something.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> Hmm... On thinking about it, all the examples you have given (burn down the forest, melt the dungeon, EMP the city block) make the PCs into Joker (as in The Dark Knight) style villains.  Even Hans Gruber didn't try EMPing a city block when he wanted the generator turned off.  Instead he got a step ahead of the opposition by reading their playbook and made the moves that would convince _them_ to turn the generator off for him.  When you are playing someone who is a level _more_ callous than Hans Gruber you're certainly ... something.




So you haven't seen the remake of Ocean's 11 then.

Half of the people I've been disagreeing with in this thread seem to be focused on completely different aspects of the issue(s) than what I consider the point.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> So you haven't seen the remake of Ocean's 11 then.




You mean the scene where they kill everyone with a pacemaker in a quarter of the city, and anyone on life support in the same radius?  All for their little con?  There's a reason Cracked leads with that movie.  And one I was cheering for the police.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> You mean the scene where they kill everyone with a pacemaker in a quarter of the city, and anyone on life support in the same radius?  All for their little con?  There's a reason Cracked leads with that movie.  And one I was cheering for the police.




I just can't figure out how to respond appropriately to the attitude of your posts without inviting suspension.  I'll settle for "I don't think you are in any way discussing the same topic I've been discussing" and move along.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I just can't figure out how to respond appropriately to the attitude of your posts without inviting suspension.  I'll settle for "I don't think you are in any way discussing the same topic I've been discussing" and move along.




You stated "So you haven't seen the remake of Ocean's 11 then."  I have.  If it were a book I would consider it a wallbanger because of The Pinch.  When they cut life support in hospitals.  When they took out pacemakers.  For that matter, turning the city dark turned out the traffic lights (and some, but not all of the cars - also woe betide anyone flying low)  The Oceans 11 crew are mass murderers.

I'm reminded of Doctor Who.  "Good men don't need rules.  Today is not the day to find out why I have so many."  Your description of Combat As War consistently involves turning your back on all moral rules and not caring who gets slaughtered as a consequence. Whether it's burning the forest down, collapsing the dungeon with everyone inside, or dropping an EMP into a civilian area.  This might not be what you want to talk about - but it would appear to be a consistent pattern with your examples.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> This might not be what you want to talk about - but it would appear to be a consistent pattern with your examples.




What is the fallacy for focusing on nitpicking examples instead of addressing the argument?  I'm describing the different styles of gameplay, and you seem determined to criticize what you think (hint: it isn't) is my playstyle.

P.S. Did you stop watching Star Wars because of the civilian contractors killed when the Death Star blew up?


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## Daztur (Jul 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:
			
		

> A civil discussion can only _start_ when you accept that even if it wasn't what was intended, the Combat as Sport/Combat as War dichotomy is inherently uncivil.




The reason I chose CaS in the first place was:
-The idea that the decisions made DURING combat mostly determine the outcome which is rather like a sporting match (each game starts fresh) rather than warfare in which maneuver and logistics before the combat starts often determine the outcome with the actual fighting being a fait accompli.
-A desire to play out combat according to rules known as all parties rather than trying to cheat and subvert the rules to get an advantage.
-The focus on combat being a fun activity in and of itself rather than the 10% terror and 90% boredom makeup that you often get in warfare (i.e. 30 minutes of fun packed into four hours or however that quote went). Combat as more of an end into itself than as a means as Savage Wombat talks about.
-All of the thinking that undergirds CR and encounter budgeting.

Wasn’t trying to go with “hur hur we like real WAR because I’m a REAL MAN but those others are playing silly easy SPORTS.” This whole thing is completely unrelated to difficulty level or skill needed.

As far as “war” being aggrandizing, maybe some of that leaked through but it really wasn’t the intent. At the time I was reading through the Black Company books and thinking how the tactics Croaker used reminded me more of a certain kind of D&D than anything else I’ve ever read. At the time I remember a player complaining about how munchkin it was for PCs to try to sneak a ballista into a dungeon and sneak attack a dragon with it literally hours after reading the Black Company staging an ambush that involved sneak attacking a powerful critter with a ballista at point blank range.

“Cheating” rather than “war” captures most of the intended meaning, but not really the emphasis on strategy/logistics over tactics.
  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] As far as the randomness goes, I think that’s really helpful in encouraging CaW (just like I find 1ed-style spell descriptions much more helpful than 0ed or 4ed ones) but not strictly necessary. You could approach a completely scripted series of encounters with a Black Company style mindset. Perhaps not the best fit but certainly possible.



			
				Iosue said:
			
		

> A civil discussion can only _start_ when you accept that even if it wasn't what was intended, the Combat as Sport/Combat as War dichotomy is inherently uncivil.




See also: Magic Tea Party.



			
				Iosue said:
			
		

> I also suspect that there's something in a Sandbox/Adventure Path dichotomy.




Somewhat. I think really strict paths are bad for both as CaS really works best if the DM doesn’t fudge stuff while if you’re running a path you might have to fudge stuff to keep the path from getting derailed.



			
				Tony Vargas said:
			
		

> Political change is rarely the goal of adventurers. 'Banditry' would probably be a more accurate term, more in keeping with the vaguely medieval setting.




Knights vs. bandits works well except it still doesn’t really capture the tactics vs. strategy/logistics focus.


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## Iosue (Jul 30, 2014)

Daztur, it looks like some quote attributions got a little messed up?  I believe that both statements attributed to me were actually by neonchameleon.


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## Daztur (Jul 30, 2014)

Iosue said:


> Daztur, it looks like some quote attributions got a little messed up?  I believe that both statements attributed to me were actually by neonchameleon.




Yes, strange, I'll fix that when I have a minute. I wrote this up offline on the subway so I wrote out the quote tags etc. by hand and must've screwed something up.


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## Hussar (Jul 30, 2014)

Daztur said:
			
		

> Knights vs. bandits works well except it still doesn’t really capture the tactics vs. strategy/logistics focus.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...illment-(from-Pulsipher)/page23#ixzz38vbaVA4b




Well, at least now I know I was fairly on point with my discussions of strategy vs tactics.  Honestly,  I think that is the best way to describe it, rather than getting mired down in pointless semantics.  CaW focuses on strategy and CaS focuses on tactics.

Only problem is, a lot of people don't know the difference between the two.  And, it does leave out logistics, which is the third pillar combat can be built on, but, it's not completely necessary.

Some people want to focus strongly on strategy - the planning part before combat starts.  This would include all sorts of actions ranging from stuff away from the table (character optimising is a strategic element) to information gathering methods, to coming up with various plans and possibly contingency plans before an encounter starts.  And, let's be fair here, virtually every group on the planet does this to some degree or other.  It's a range, not an on/off switch.  

Other people want to focus on tactics - what you do after initiative is rolled.  It's largely reactive, rarely proactive.  You get in the fight with the baddies, now you start working together as a team to focus fire, synergize activities, whatever.  Again, virtually every group will do this to some degree or other.  And again, it's a range, not an on/off switch.

Now, I do believe different editions emphasise different approaches.  4e certainly has a tactical focus.  Strategy is a lot less focused on since there is so much at the tactical level.  You simply don't have the strategic options that you have in 3e.  Conversely, 3e is a lot less tactically inclined than 4e.  Again, you just have less options once initiative is rolled, but, outside of initiative, you have all sorts of things you can do in 3e that you cannot easily do in 4e.  1e, IMO, is the weakest of the three for both focuses.  There is a lack of tactical or strategic options in 1e and 2e.  But, OTOH, there is a much much stronger focus on logistical elements, which fits with AD&D's war-game roots where logistical considerations can be easily as important as anything else in combat.


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## Aenghus (Jul 30, 2014)

I do think tactics, strategy and logistics are good terms. The planning I referred to in previous points pertains mostly to the latter two. 

I think the earliest editions of the game had a mish mash of mechanics that often resulted in poor odds for the players when used, the rules were of variable quality. This encourages players to evade or bypass the rules to achieve their goals, and if the DM wants the players to make progress she has an incentive to accept at least some of these bypass events.

The incredible subjectivity of this, combined with the deadliness of the early game, meant that one DM's amazing out-of the-box ploy from a player was to another DM a dumb stunt that got your PC killed. This stuff was minimaly transferrable between different DMs and highly idiosyncratic, you had to learn your DM's biases and what they liked and disliked in the game.

The functionality of the mechanics have improved though the editions, not always but often, so there is much less incentive for goal-oriented players to evade the rules to obtain success when they are able to do so more reliably through the rules.

I suspect the communication failures that occurring here over means and ends is at least partially due to unstated and disparate goals - e.g. generally a dungeon in D&D is something to be explored, not flooded and destroyed. Whether the latter course is to be permitted and encouraged is a matter for all the participants to decide on as a metagame issue, as it's a matter of "what the game is about", something everyone should have a say on.

(Incidentally I have rarely seen water pumps in dungeons, and without them or magic most dungeons should be flooded on the lower levels. But mostly they are not. Interesting)


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## Hussar (Jul 30, 2014)

Heh.  It's so rare to find dungeon maps with verticality at all, that flooding isn't an issue anyway.  Very, very few dungeon maps have enough levels to matter.  Which is something I do dislike.  I want more verticality.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 30, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Now, I do believe different editions emphasise different approaches.  4e certainly has a tactical focus.  Strategy is a lot less focused on since there is so much at the tactical level.  You simply don't have the strategic options that you have in 3e.  Conversely, 3e is a lot less tactically inclined than 4e.  Again, you just have less options once initiative is rolled, but, outside of initiative, you have all sorts of things you can do in 3e that you cannot easily do in 4e.  1e, IMO, is the weakest of the three for both focuses.  There is a lack of tactical or strategic options in 1e and 2e.  But, OTOH, there is a much much stronger focus on logistical elements, which fits with AD&D's war-game roots where logistical considerations can be easily as important as anything else in combat.




Thinking about my games, this seems largely true, but one might note that Wizards (specifically) and their close relatives, and to a much lesser extent other spellcasters (such as Clerics, Druids, SPs, etc.), in 2E (won't speak for 1E) have some fairly serious logistical, strategic and tactical options hard-coded into the rules via spells.

Whenever I think about this kind of thing, a particular incident from 2E comes up for me, the still-infamous in my games "Giant Funeral Ambush", wherein 3 PCs killed the vast majority of male giants of fighting age in The Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (as well as their orcs etc.), in a horrifying couple of dozen rounds, if that (most of which were "mop-up", morale rapidly having been broken).

It was a serious victory of logistics over strategy or tactics. The PCs had elaborately but partially accidentally created a situation where the Hill Giants were holding a funeral for one high-up giant (looooooong story) and the PCs knew about it (part of long story!).

I assumed, as a foolish, naive, decent, non-hair-raising human being, thought they'd just use this to count giant numbers and/or get in, steal treasure and/or set fire to the steading. I reckoned without the Elf Wizard's ambition, or the Dwarf Ftr/SP of Clangeddin's divinely-mandated hatred of giants.

Instead, they planned an ambush. 

Virtually a full-frontal assault. The Wizard memorized every buff that could meaningfully buff the Ftr/SP and Rogue, and the rest was all AE damage/CC spells. The Cleric found every self/group buff he could (he had a lot, he was practically CoDzilla before there was CoDzilla). They dug up every long-hoarded buff potion, magic weapon oil, and applicable scroll. The entire portable hole was virtually turned inside-out. They carefully worked out how they were going to buff themselves into the sky.

They did not, at this point, even know how many giants or others there were in their, precisely (the Rogue did a recce whilst Invisible but his PLAYER got freaked out by how scary it was to be alone in a giant-house half-way through and had his PC leave the building!). So they had no real "strategy" - just "We will hit them with everything we have!".

The day came, the buff-ladder was climbed (I tried to find problems, but they were thorough, and the potion miscibility table loved them - also they didn't push it too far, potion-wise). I was in a kind of shock. I couldn't believe an LG, LN, and CG PC were going to attack a funeral. They waited for everyone to get into their funeral positions, watching the giants set up the pyre, file out to pay their respects and conduct the ceremony and so on, then unleashed hell. The Wizard dropped AEs, Walls etc. from max range (possibly whilst Improved Invisible, I forget), causing chaos (he did avoid the women, children and infirm, at least, I guess there's that  ), whilst the others charged across the field, invisible, before emerging, 20+ft tall (Enlarge and other spells/potions stacked up), buffed to the nines, among the giant leadership (because they were closest, not for, like, a good reason!), and really putting them in a blender. I seem to recall that the orcs etc. weren't deployed initially, but when they came out, a couple of good AEs from the Wizard killed about 90% of them.

It was practically a warcrime, I guess just barely on the right side of that, but oh god was it a victory for logistics and planning of resource-usage. They sent ME (ME!) out of the room at one point so they could discuss it!

But generally I've seen every kind of play in every edition... that just sticks with me from 2E.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

A great example.  And demonstrative that just because you personally don't favor a particular style of play doesn't mean you aren't well aware of it.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> A great example.  And demonstrative that just because you personally don't favor a particular style of play doesn't mean you aren't well aware of it.




Hahaha!

I think that might be WHY I don't favour logistical play any more! 

Both because I was so traumatised by it (I mean, that's kind of hyperbole but also kind of not!) and because honestly, it seemed like the apex of that play-mode, like, they'd never fly any higher, logistics-wise, than that (might be wrong, but it felt that way).


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 30, 2014)

Daztur said:


> The reason I chose CaS in the first place was:
> -The idea that the decisions made DURING combat mostly determine the outcome which is rather like a sporting match (each game starts fresh)
> -A desire to play out combat according to rules known as all parties rather than trying to cheat and subvert the rules to get an advantage.
> -The focus on combat being a fun activity in and of itself
> ...



 What you intended may reflect well on you (or not, it's a matter of opinion, I suppose), but what you actually communicated to a lot of us was the "hur hur..." line.  The us/them structure of the idea, alone, makes that almost inevitable, the biased language and presentation  - which, I absolutely take you at your word, was unintentional - and, of course, the context of the edition war, merely clinched it.



> “Cheating” rather than “war” captures most of the intended meaning, but not really the emphasis on strategy/logistics over tactics.
> 
> Knights vs. bandits works well except it still doesn’t really capture the tactics vs. strategy/logistics focus.



 I don't think you're really going to find anything that captures the tactics vs strategy dichotomy, since the two are really complementary rather than antithetical things.  Any military operation is going to be concerned with an overarching strategy or doctrine, logistics to support it, and tactics to execute it.  Sports aren't that different in that regard, they're just played by different rules.  


I think, ultimately, you were searching for a justification of the edition war.  There may not be one.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I think, ultimately, you were searching for a justification of the edition war.  There may not be one.




What's wrong with taking him at his word?

From my perspective, the only thing that really gave away his preference was that he had way too much fun writing his example of fighting bees.


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> What is the fallacy for focusing on nitpicking examples instead of addressing the argument?




In  this case "Not ignoring the elephant in the room."  Putting that  elephant in the room no less than three times on this thread alone means  that whether or not you want to talk about it it's a very definite part  of your conception of Combat as War.



> P.S. Did you stop watching Star Wars because of the civilian contractors killed when the Death Star blew up?




No.  Had the Deathstar _not_ blown up a planet and been a  clear and present danger to others things would be different.  There  was, at a Watsonian level, no option that would lead to less collateral  damage than blowing up the Deathstar.  (Leaving it standing would have  lead to the destruction of more planets).  If the goal had been to take  out Darth Vader and they'd chosen to do it by blowing up the Deathstar  that was itself stationary, that would have been a big problem.



Daztur said:


> The reason I chose CaS in the first place was:




As  I have said repeatedly, I absolutely do not believe there was any bad  faith in your choice of terms.  I believe they were mischosen for the  reasons I've indicated but expecting perfection of people is far too  much.



> At the time I remember a player complaining about how munchkin  it was for PCs to try to sneak a ballista into a dungeon and sneak  attack a dragon with it literally hours after reading the Black Company  staging an ambush that involved sneak attacking a powerful critter with a  ballista at point blank range.




I honestly don't see  what's wrong with that.  If you can get the ballista there in the first  place and the dragon doesn't spot it.



Hussar said:


> Heh.  It's so rare to find dungeon maps with  verticality at all, that flooding isn't an issue anyway.  Very, very few  dungeon maps have enough levels to matter.  Which is something I do  dislike.  I want more verticality.




This is one of many reasons I love Caverns of Thracia as a dungeon.  From memory there's even a magical swamp at the bottom.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> In  this case "Not ignoring the elephant in the room."  Putting that  elephant in the room no less than three times on this thread alone means  that whether or not you want to talk about it it's a very definite part  of your conception of Combat as War.




Ignoring the clear implication that you think I support such behavior - 

How does the idea that Combat as War includes the possibility of "terroristic" behavior invalidate it as a label of a particular playstyle?  I understand it perfectly as why you _dislike _that style - but are you claiming that it doesn't exist?  That there aren't players that play that way?

I don't see it as a useful argument for "Combat as War is a bad name" because War as a broad category includes that behavior.
I don't see it as a useful argument for "CaW/CaS is not a useful dichotomy" because it's not relevant to that discussion.

I understand if you feel that D&D should support, and encourage, heroic action-y behavior over callous-disregard-for-life behavior.  But that's not the way everyone plays, and we're talking about a continuum of play behavior here.  

Combat as War is not defined by "terroristic" actions.  But the playspace it defines includes the possibility.  Just as the playspace for Combat as Sport includes "you see an orc guarding a pie; roll initiative".  It's not the end-all, be-all of the category.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> What's wrong with taking him at his word?



 I am:



Daztur said:


> On another forum I’ve been running in circles with fans of other editions about different D&D play styles and how different editions support them, but I think I’ve finally nailed a key difference that sheds an enormous amount of light about so many disagreements ....
> 
> While either form of D&D can be played with any edition, it works better with some editions than others.  TSR-D&D mostly sucks at Combat as Sport.... Also a lot of elements of TSR-D&D design that drive Combat as Sport people crazy, really tie into the Combat as War mindset. ..
> 
> With 3ed the game shifted a bit towards Combat as Sport and then shifted a good bit more with 4ed. In 4ed it’s easy to tell what’s a good fair fight for a given party and combat rarely goes in a direction that the DM completely didn’t expect and there’s tons of fun combat variety. However, the 4ed focus on balancing combat at the encounter level rather than the adventure level runs directly counter to Combat as War gameplay. ...But probably most importantly, 4ed combat just takes too damn long for Combat as War players. If you’re going to spend your time doing sneaky rat bastard Black Company stuff before combat starts, then having combat take a long time is just taking time away from the fun bits of play.





Daztur said:


> The main point of this post was trying to understand why a lot of the posts of 4ed fans sound like crazy moon logic to me while mine seem insane to them, I think this is a better rubric than most I've seen for providing an explanation for that.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> I am:




Maybe I'm misunderstanding your use of "justification" here.  I'd say he was looking for a root cause, or explanation, of the edition warring-behavior - as opposed to a reason why the edition war was right and necessary.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Maybe I'm misunderstanding your use of "justification" here.  I'd say he was looking for a root cause, or explanation, of the edition warring-behavior - as opposed to a reason why the edition war was right and necessary.



 A fine distinction, but not an unreasonable one.  He was seeking an explanation, then, that laid the 'blame' for the edition war on the contents of the edition he was warring against.  That seems a lot like justification, to me, but I suppose one could judge it, very dispassionately (which can be hard for a veteran of the edition wars to do, even when consciously making the effort) ignoring all charged language and the 'side' the person expounding upon it was admittedly on, as merely seeking an 'explanation.'

There are much better explanations (really, a large set of contributing factors, rather than a single explanation), though.  The reflexive rejection of the new that happens with every rev-roll, the nostalgic regard that the large segment of the fanbase who started with AD&D (myself included) has for classic D&D, a desire to continue the lavish rewards for system mastery that 3.5 provided, and so forth...

The idea - not unique to CaW/CaS - that the more balanced edition didn't 'support' this or that imagined playstyle, though, is one a very poor one.  The playstyles are defined into being after the fact, for one thing, which is a red flag indicative of a rationalization rather than a reason.   And, even so, playstyles generally were not, in fact, impossible or singled out and discouraged - they were merely made part of a larger set of playstyles that could be pursued without undue 'reward' or 'punishment.'  Not the first time the opening up of alternatives was viewed as a threat to tradition.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> A fine distinction, but not an unreasonable one.  He was seeking an explanation, then, that laid the 'blame' for the edition war on the contents of the edition he was warring against.  That seems a lot like justification, to me, but I suppose one could judge it, very dispassionately (which can be hard for a veteran of the edition wars to do, even when consciously making the effort) ignoring all charged language and the 'side' the person expounding upon it was admittedly on, as merely seeking an 'explanation.'




OK, this is the thing.  My mental picture of Daztur's train of thought (exaggerated for effect):

"That sure was an interesting thing my friend said about that MMORPG feeling more like 'war' than a 'game'."
"Hmm.  I've played in D&D games that feel more like 'war' than a 'game'."
"You know, some of the people I've heard from who dislike 4e say it feels too 'gamey'."
"I wonder if that's the same thing?  I'll think on this some more."

Now, this is just my perception, but I think he was attempting a description of 4e that would explain that reaction.  And it happened to be a description you disagreed with.

This is not the same as saying "4e sux because...".  But you seem to be determined to interpret his statement in that way.

Now, in this particular thread, I've been trying very hard to avoid mentioning editions at all - since, as demonstrated, a lot of the criticisms of any edition are not based in solid fact.  But I do think the concept of CaW/CaS has some interesting aspects, so I wanted to discuss it.  But the reactions I get from the "veterans of the edition wars" seem to be based in the assumption that I am continuing to attack their preferred game regardless of what I actually say.  And several posters have bashed the concept solely on what they _think _Daztur, or I, _meant _instead of what he or I _said_.  A pet peeve of mine.

So, I dispute the charge that Daztur's post was an extension of the edition war, and feel that the edition war was unfairly dragged into the whole debate.

And I apologize in advance if this is the post that gets the thread closed.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Now, in this particular thread, I've been trying very hard to avoid mentioning editions at all - since, as demonstrated, a lot of the criticisms of any edition are not based in solid fact.



 A good policy.



> But I do think the concept of CaW/CaS has some interesting aspects, so I wanted to discuss it...
> So, I dispute the charge that Daztur's post was an extension of the edition war, and feel that the edition war was unfairly dragged into the whole debate.



 Any 'explanation' that excused hatred of an edition involved in the edition war can't help but be tied to that unfortunate conflict.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 30, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Any 'explanation' that excused *hatred* of an edition involved in the edition war can't help but be tied to that unfortunate conflict.




Hatred.  In the absence of direct name-calling, why is expressing dislike for something the equivalent of hate?

I'm sure you support the right of people to play the way they want.  And I'm sure you support the right of ENWorlders to discuss, civilly, why they like what they like.  Which usually implies a certain amount of why they like what they dislike.  

Again, I don't like it when people argue with what they imagine I'm thinking, instead of what I'm saying.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 30, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> I don't like it when people argue with what they imagine I'm thinking, instead of what I'm saying.



 Consider that what you're trying to say may not be the same as the message they receive.


However, one way to get in more interesting discussion would be to tease the interesting ideas out, and examine them on their own. For instance, you can discuss the potential of strategic focus or resource management without contrasting them to other approaches or pointing to this or that game as 'bad' for such things.


The same goes for the OP. The 'interesting choices' half could have made for an interesting discussion, if the OP hadn't chosen to provide a contrast the way he did.


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## Pickles JG (Jul 30, 2014)

Daztur said:


> Guerilla combat vs. swashbuckling combat works too. There’s a reason why I chose the Princess Bride duel for the CaS example to go along with Indy shoots the guy with the sword as the CaW example.




I liked your original analysis & did not peg you as anti 4e at all from it. I was wondering the other day abou t this issue. At some point D&D switched from being about collecting treasure & circumventing difficult fights & inconvenient traps into being about fighting stuff. Obviously in both forms of the game as originally described they are er games & carried out for the entertainment of the players. Both sides are fighting as sport. 

I have been running EotE in google plus. Here the slightly suspect system & the overhead on playing without any mapping tools means we shy away from combat & other hugely mechanical situations. Combats are assassinations from long distance. A race involved several weeks of nobbling the other racers. Planning a heist took several weeks & the results could be narrated from what had already happened in the set up with minimal further dice rolling etc. I think this is partly because the systems are somewhat bad & not fun to engage in too closely. 

In 4e where tactical combat is great fun, for those of us who like such things, we jump at the chance to play it. Uneven battles are often anticlimactic (& still long)  so we are disincentivised from making them so (though we would still rather insanely difficult missions were simpler so there is some scope for planning, research & strategy. Logistics is right out )


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 30, 2014)

Pickles JG said:


> At some point D&D switched from being about collecting treasure & circumventing difficult fights & inconvenient traps into being about fighting stuff.



 Depending on who you talk to, it switched /back/ to that, since Greyhawk (supplement 1, 1975), changed the exp system to try to make the game less about fighting and more about treasure-hunting.  2e backed off from that, making exp for treasure optional, and later editions (including 5e), dropped it entirely.  So 1989 or 2000, depending on how you look at it - though, really, no exp for gp was a very common variant prior to that, as well.


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## Hussar (Jul 31, 2014)

Heh, just to related this back to the thread a bit, you all realize that neither Strategic combat, nor Tactical combat has anything to do with difficulty?    Both can be difficult or easy.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 31, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Heh, just to related this back to the thread a bit, you all realize that neither Strategic combat, nor Tactical combat has anything to do with difficulty?    Both can be difficult or easy.




See, I think it's not just about Strategic or Tactical combat.  There's also something [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] -ian about scene framing which I'm not good at talking about.  Like whether you accept the DM's framing of the encounter as an obstacle to be overcome, or reframe the situation into one where you control the terms of the encounter.


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## Hussar (Jul 31, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> See, I think it's not just about Strategic or Tactical combat.  There's also something [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] -ian about scene framing which I'm not good at talking about.  Like whether you accept the DM's framing of the encounter as an obstacle to be overcome, or reframe the situation into one where you control the terms of the encounter.




I think there are similarities here though.  Strategic level planning often requires the players to be able to reframe the scenario through their own efforts.  By the time you are in tactical level combat, there really isn't a whole lot of reframing that you can do - there just isn't enough time.  That's an important point to remember too.  Strategic level planning requires a much slower approach to the scenario.  After all, it takes time to gather information, question prisoners, choose spells, whatnot.  These are all elements that are largely fixed once initiative is rolled.

Permertonian scene framing is largely at the strategic level, from what I understand, typically through things like Skill Challenges, which are at a much longer (typically anyway) time scale than combat.  I mean, even a 20 round combat is still only two minutes of real time.  There really isn't a huge amount of changing the scenario you can do in that time.

Strategic level play is all about setting the initial conditions of the encounter.  If you've done things right, the actual encounter is largely already resolved before initiative is rolled.  You've ambushed the bad guys, cast your buffs, gotten into position, etc, and combat is largely a foregone conclusion.  Which is where 4e has problems because 4e doesn't really do well with that style of game - the point of play is at the tactical level, where you are making choices round by round and reacting to the scenario as it plays out.  Because 4e lacks a lot of the choices, particularly magic, at the strategic level, I can see why people who want strategic play would be turned off by 4e.


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## pemerton (Jul 31, 2014)

Aenghus said:


> I suspect the communication failures that occurring here over means and ends is at least partially due to unstated and disparate goals - e.g. generally a dungeon in D&D is something to be explored, not flooded and destroyed. Whether the latter course is to be permitted and encouraged is a matter for all the participants to decide on as a metagame issue, as it's a matter of "what the game is about", something everyone should have a say on.



This seems to me to relate to [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION]'s discussion upthread of different approaches to ToH. It's in part about colour/flavour (what do the players want the content of the fiction to be) and in part about mechanics (what sorts of mechanical manipulations do the players want to engage in as part of playing the game) and of course these two things interact.



Ruin Explorer said:


> It was a serious victory of logistics over strategy or tactics.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> oh god was it a victory for logistics and planning of resource-usage. They sent ME (ME!) out of the room at one point so they could discuss it!





Savage Wombat said:


> A great example.  And demonstrative that just because you personally don't favor a particular style of play doesn't mean you aren't well aware of it.



At least for my part, I'm not unaware of the playstyle that Ruin Explorer describes. My group (both present and past members, the past members now mostly moved to England) includes experts at this: two former Asia/Oceania M:tG champions, plus a couple of guys who used to dominate the local play-by-mail scene.

I remember one time in a tournament game we shocked the GM: having entered an encounter in a relaxed way, and being beaten off, we took stock and actually planned and prepared with maximum buffing, Protection scroll use etc, and then swept all before us. (But from memory ended up making a wrong story choice and losing the tournament.)

My Rolemaster games also had a lot of this, complicated by the fact that - in our particular RM variant - a lot of the buffing depended upon storing spells and then casting them later (so as to conserve spell points), and also storing spells on non-casters so that they could then cast them later. With a stored spell in RM, normal spells can't be used unless another (expensive) enhancer (Bypass Stored Spell) is used first; and the stored spells have to come out in the same order that they went in. So the whole buffing routine depended upon complex optimisation of sequences of storing and then casting (either via bypass or casting the stored spells) so that everything worked out properly and the minimum number of points were spent on bypass spells and non-stored buffs.

Towards the end of the second of two long campaigns, group Time Stop also figured heavily. And in the first campaign, which featured a lot of divination magic, it was common to test any plan under Intuitions (an Augury-like effect) before actually implementing it in the real world.

But I don't see that the label "combat as war" is a very good descriptor of this sort of stuff. "Operational play" was a label that used to get used hear by Raven Crowking and others, and it seems reasonable enough. Whether or not it is fun is of course a matter of taste. These days I prefer play in which the scene, rather than preparation in anticipation of the scene, is what matters.



Savage Wombat said:


> See, I think it's not just about Strategic or Tactical combat.  There's also something [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] -ian about scene framing which I'm not good at talking about.  Like whether you accept the DM's framing of the encounter as an obstacle to be overcome, or reframe the situation into one where you control the terms of the encounter.



I agree with this, and I think that framing it as strategic or tactical _within the fiction_ is a red herring, for the sorts of reasons that Libramarian has given.

Within the fiction, for instance, the choice to attack Rutania or Alteria first is a strategic one; but in gameplay there's no reason why that can't be a choice that is made within a framed scene, and the upshot of the choice resolved by one (or perhaps a handfulf of) skill checks. (In 4e, perhaps Diplomacy and History would be the relevant skills.)

But (disregarding [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]'s advice and talking about edition preferences), it's not only about scene-reframing. For instance, a very common criticism of 3E and 4e from old-school players is that they permit items to be discovered via a search check rather than requiring free-form decription of the search.

Now let's put to one side that Gygax, in his DMG, discusses both methods as options and says either is fine, or even that a given game can use both, depending on mood and whim. Let's just focus on what a Perception check to search the room actually means _at the table_. It is a scene-reframing tool: the scene changes from one in which the question before the players is "What's in this room" to "Given that the room has XYZ in it, what are we going to do with/about that?"

Diplomacy, in 3E, is the same thing: instead of the scene being "You meet this unhelpful/angry person", the successful Diplomacy check reframes that as "You are in the company of this helpful/friendly person".

I'm not a big fan of those 3E mechanics - I think they tend to lead to boring play, as the players reframe scenes away from challenges towards cakewalks. (I don't like free-forming searches, either - so my solution is just not to put much hidden stuff into my game.) I also think that the desire for player-side reframing mechanics is in part a marker of bad GMing: if the players want to reframe your scenes rather than engage them, then you're framing crappy/boring scenes!

But my dislike for player-side framing mechanics also means that I don't like scry-buff-teleport, and more generally don't like buff-oriented play very much (which isn't literally reframing but does tend to put the emphasis of play not in the scene itself, but in the lead-up to it).

The OSR/"CaW" players who like scry-buff-teleport but dislike 3E's Perception and Diplomacy mechanics therefore aren't just embracing player-side scene reframing. It's more subtle than that. (I think it's connected in complex ways to fictional positioning, and "say yes" mechanics, and other stuff too. I'll elaborate if anyone's interested, though [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] can probably both do a better job.)


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## Neonchameleon (Jul 31, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Ignoring the clear implication that you think I support such behavior -
> 
> How does the idea that Combat as War includes the possibility of  "terroristic" behavior invalidate it as a label of a particular  playstyle?




It doesn't.

It just means that by all your examples (and a lot of others) it is very _very_ difficult to play as other than either moustache twirling, kitten burning villains.



> I understand it perfectly as why you _dislike _that style - but are you claiming that it doesn't exist?  That there aren't players that play that way?




Nope.  I am, however, saying that "Combat as villains" would be a more accurate description.



Pickles JG said:


> I liked your original analysis & did  not peg you as anti 4e at all from it. I was wondering the other day  abou t this issue. At some point D&D switched from being about  collecting treasure & circumventing difficult fights &  inconvenient traps into being about fighting stuff. Obviously in both  forms of the game as originally described they are er games &  carried out for the entertainment of the players. Both sides are  fighting as sport.




That switch started when the game got  away from Lake Geneva and there were people going only off Gygax's  frankly confusing rules.  It grew throughout the 70s and was very  definitely mainstream by the time DL1 with its complete fudging "Obscure  Death Rule".  And the Grab the Loot playstyle was marginalised when 2e  made the fundamental change of relegating XP for GP to an optional rule.



> In 4e where tactical combat is great fun, for those of us who  like such things, we jump at the chance to play it. Uneven battles are  often anticlimactic (& still long)  so we are disincentivised from  making them so (though we would still rather insanely difficult missions  were simpler so there is some scope for planning, research &  strategy. Logistics is right out )




Not ... entirely out.  But it's normally not handled via the combat  rules.  The key to strategy isn't beating the enemy but making them  irrelevant.


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## Tony Vargas (Jul 31, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Strategic level play is all about setting the initial conditions of the encounter.  If you've done things right, the actual encounter is largely already resolved before initiative is rolled.  You've ambushed the bad guys, cast your buffs, gotten into position, etc, and combat is largely a foregone conclusion.



 That's not really 'strategic level play,' unless it's an extremely idealized version.  I mean, I'm very familiar with that style of play, and you can certainly do that with the right GM in a wide range of systems - it's mainly a matter of convincing the DM your plan is infallible.

There  aren't really infallible plans, tough, not even conceptually, there those which are well-executed and have nothing go wrong, and there are the vast majority that don't survive first contact with the enemy.  



> Which is where 4e has problems because 4e doesn't really do well with that style of game - the point of play is at the tactical level, where you are making choices round by round and reacting to the scenario as it plays out.  Because 4e lacks a lot of the choices, particularly magic, at the strategic level, I can see why people who want strategic play would be turned off by 4e.



 4e doesn't lack choices, it just lacks profoundly imbalanced or wildly abuseable ones.  It also has a more broadly applicable system for resolving actions outside of combat - Skill Challenges - that is still character-referent.  That is, if the players want to set up a combat so they have an advantage, or avoid a combat, or even turn it into a foregone conclusion, they can - but they'll have to make use of the abilities of their characters to do it.  They can't just convince the DM their plan is perfect or that an off-label use of a spell crossed with middle-school science facts equals overwhelming power.  

So it's not so much that you can't have a strategic focus, it's just that shifting to a strategic focus doesn't remove character-based resolution systems nor open up as many/dramatic opportunities for wildly overpowered exploits.


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## Savage Wombat (Jul 31, 2014)

pemerton said:


> But I don't see that the label "combat as war" is a very good descriptor of this sort of stuff. "Operational play" was a label that used to get used hear by Raven Crowking and others, and it seems reasonable enough. Whether or not it is fun is of course a matter of taste. These days I prefer play in which the scene, rather than preparation in anticipation of the scene, is what matters.




Can I have a definition (or a link to an article) of Operational Play to compare with my mental model?


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## Hussar (Aug 1, 2014)

Tony V said:
			
		

> So it's not so much that you can't have a strategic focus, it's just that shifting to a strategic focus doesn't remove character-based resolution systems nor open up as many/dramatic opportunities for wildly overpowered exploits.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...illment-(from-Pulsipher)/page26#ixzz395lvjInK




Yes and no.  Hirelings, for example, is a very good example of strategic (or operational [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION]) play.  Hiring spear carriers to bolster your ranks makes sense in strategic play.  "Bring more guys to the fight" is rarely a bad strategy after all. 

But, in 4e, that's going to become a huge PITA.  Even using the cohort (that's the wrong term - but, I forget the right one) rules from DMG 2 (?) or the NPC rules in the DMG 1, adding in half a dozen allied combatants is going to grind combat to a crippling crawl.  And minion rules don't help that much on the player side since you actually want your hirelings to survive more than one fight.

Note, 3e isn't a whole lot better here, but, still, from a table time perspective, not as bad.  A bunch of Warrior 1 or 2 hirelings generally won't slow combat down that much.  It's not like they have a whole lot of tactical choice in combat - roll a single attack, roll damage.  4e NPC's generally will have a basic attack and an encounter level attack as well, which does slow things down.

Note, it can be done in 4e, it's just slow.

So, I do disagree that strategic play is limited to "wildly overpowered exploits".  Do you consider Bless+Bardic music wildly overpowered?  The "buff before combat" option is not very strong in 4e, but is a pretty key element in success in 3e.  Even in 1e and 2e, buffing can make a big difference.  It does help a lot when invisibility lasts all day.    Sure, on the high end, you can get some ridiculous combinations, but, in 3e Sweet Spot play, the options are still there to perform all sorts of actions before combat starts.  Even something as simple as a couple of Monster Summonings before combat starts can make a huge difference in the encounter.  I've never heard anyone complain that Monster Summoning 4 is a wildly overpowered spell.


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## pemerton (Aug 1, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> 4e doesn't lack choices, it just lacks profoundly imbalanced or wildly abuseable ones.  It also has a more broadly applicable system for resolving actions outside of combat - Skill Challenges - that is still character-referent.  That is, if the players want to set up a combat so they have an advantage, or avoid a combat, or even turn it into a foregone conclusion, they can - but they'll have to make use of the abilities of their characters to do it.  They can't just convince the DM their plan is perfect or that an off-label use of a spell crossed with middle-school science facts equals overwhelming power.



Just adding to this - the feature of 4e that you describe means that prep (at least when done via skill chalenge) is itself a scene, which the players have to engage and try and succeed at, rather than some preliminary to a scene which then determines the outcome of that later scene.



Savage Wombat said:


> Can I have a definition (or a link to an article) of Operational Play to compare with my mental model?



No link from me, sorry - a google of "Raven Crowking operational play" doesn't bring up anything relevant except for my earlier post in this thread.

I think Advanced Squad Leader is seen as an exemplar for this sort of play, and I think it also overlaps to a high degree with [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s "logicistical play". Mapping, prep, managing resources - those "accounting" aspects that loom large in a certain style of play - are at the heart of operational play.

I think Gygax's description of "skilled play" in the final (pre-Appendix) pages of his PHB captures the main features of operational play pretty well: select a target/mission, choose the right equipment and spells, plan it out, and then methodolically proceed to implement that plan, departing from it only if an obvious and easy new target presents itself, or if the party becomes lost.

On this approach, encounters that the players weren't expecting - either wandering monsters, or occupied rooms that are entered by mistake - are to be avoided. The emphasis is on players controlling the framing (and the GM isn't allowed to change the backstory, of dungeon layout and contents, once it is set).


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Yes and no.  Hirelings, for example, is a very good example of strategic (or operational [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION]) play.  Hiring spear carriers to bolster your ranks makes sense in strategic play.  "Bring more guys to the fight" is rarely a bad strategy after all.
> 
> But, in 4e, that's going to become a huge PITA.  Even using the cohort (that's the wrong term - but, I forget the right one) rules from DMG 2 (?) or the NPC rules in the DMG 1, adding in half a dozen allied combatants is going to grind combat to a crippling crawl.  And minion rules don't help that much on the player side since you actually want your hirelings to survive more than one fight.



 Ever tried using a swarm or 'mob' to represent troops on both sides of a larger battle?  It can work.  It makes the most sense if there's a large level disparity between the PCs, main villains, and the individuals making up the mob.  Another option is to define the common soldiers on each side as a terrain power, rather than churn through their individual turns. [sblock] It's an abstraction, but while the PCs are fighting the bad-guys that their allies can't handle, the allies are occupying the annoyance-level bad-guys, but the PCs (and maybe the main bad guys) can use an action to get their minions to do something that impacts the fight with their betters.  (You can tell I've been DMing too much lately, because the thing that springs to mind is a Villain mook-terrain power:  "Seize Him!" Villains spends an action, makes a CHA attack vs the REF of a PC to restrain him save ends.  He's got guards hanging off him, but he can still fight at -2, and doesn't even need an action - just a 10+ at the end of his turn - to toss them away or kill them.)

Again, great for incorporating otherwise too-numerous and too-low level creatures into an encounter.  [/sblock]

For fewer, closer to PC level allies, yeah, companions work fine.  Another trick I've done in every edition is to have any NPCs recruited just pair off with enemies and effectively remove eachother the from the combat.  



> Note, 3e isn't a whole lot better here, but, still, from a table time perspective, not as bad.  A bunch of Warrior 1 or 2 hirelings generally won't slow combat down that much.



 Oh, any version of D&D will slow to crawl if you go from the usual handful of combatants to 'bunches' without pulling in some attendant wargame construct, like battlesystem or Chainmail 'figures' in the olden days or mobs/swarms/throngs in 3e or 4e.



> So, I do disagree that strategic play is limited to "wildly overpowered exploits".  Do you consider Bless+Bardic music wildly overpowered?  The "buff before combat" option is not very strong in 4e, but is a pretty key element in success in 3e.



 In 3e, yes, you could stack up pre-buffs until you ran out of named bonuses to stack (and there were a lot more bonus names), and, yes, that was wildly overpowered exploitation of the system, no question.

In 4e, there are relatively few buffs that aren't riders on attacks or minor actions, so pre-buffing isn't often necessary.  Neither is pre-buffing in games broken by it a wildly strategic thing, it's just exploiting weaknesses in the system (excessive stacking, LFQW, 5MWD).

In genre, when the heroes get 'pre-buffed,' which isn't that often, really (except maybe for training montages), it's usually to give them a chance against an enemy they otherwise couldn't face at all, not to erase the Big Bad without a hitch.

Really, I think there's a different style or 'creative agenda' at work here than just strategic focus or exploiting systems.  There's a perverse counter-genre impulse among nerds who love a genre.  You see it a lot among comics fans, for instance: "why didn't Hero X use power Y in issue 123, he woulda totally owned villain Z" (and I point this out as someone who's engaged in plenty of it, myself).  

And RPG, providing stats for everyone involved, is an ideal tool for playing out those anticlimactic, counter-genre, 'what ifs.'  It can be a fun/interesting (even hilarious) exercise, really so I'm not disparaging it. 



pemerton said:


> Just adding to this - the feature of 4e that you describe means that prep (at least when done via skill chalenge) is itself a scene, which the players have to engage and try and succeed at, rather than some preliminary to a scene which then determines the outcome of that later scene.



 OK, that I will  certainly agree with.  But, really, that's kind of the point.  Strategic focus doesn't require you break or exploit or reach beyond the system - if the system can handle it.  

And the strategic-planning/prep 'scene' is one framed primarily by the PCs, no?

Using strategic focus /as an excuse to break or exploit or reach beyond the system/ may not work as well in 4e, but you can have strategic focus if you want it.



> I think Gygax's description of "skilled play" in the final (pre-Appendix) pages of his PHB captures the main features of operational play pretty well: select a target/mission, choose the right equipment and spells, plan it out, and then methodolically proceed to implement that plan, departing from it only if an obvious and easy new target presents itself, or if the party becomes lost.



 OK.  Doesn't sound like CaW anymore, though, because CaW wants to quickly blow through the foregone conclusion at the end of the planning and prep, rather than 'methodically implement'/execute the plan in detail.  And, 4e's handling of detailed tactical set-piece battles would be ideal for tactical execution portion of that 'skilled play.'


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## pemerton (Aug 1, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Another option is to define the common soldiers on each side as a terrain power, rather than churn through their original turns.  It's an abstraction, but while the PCs are fighting the bad-guys that their allies can't handle, the allies are occupying the annoyance-level bad-guys, but the PCs (and maybe the main bad guys) can use an action to get their minions to do something that impacts the fight with their betters.



The last time this came up in my game, the drow archery support were able to deliver a low-damage AoE attack triggered by a minor action from the PC commander.



Tony Vargas said:


> And the strategic-planning/prep 'scene' is one framed primarily by the PCs, no?



Depends how it is handled. But if you're doing it in 4e as a skill challenge, then the expectation (or, at least, my way of doing it) is that the GM will frame the challenge and introduce any relevant complications (eg in recruiting NPC allies, or discovering the secret cache of power-up items, or whatever the prep might consist in).



Tony Vargas said:


> Doesn't sound like CaW anymore, though, because CaW wants to quickly blow through the foregone conclusion at the end of the planning and prep, rather than 'methodically implement'/execute the plan in detail.



Maybe. I don't really have a handle on what "CaW" is meant to be, if it's not Gygaxian skilled play or something in that general neighbourhood. The ToH example that [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION] gave upthread, for instance - of methodically progressing through the tomb using orc henchmen - fits within the Gygaxian paradigm, but does not involve "quickly blowing through the foregone conclusion".


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 1, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Maybe. I don't really have a handle on what "CaW" is meant to be, if it's not Gygaxian skilled play or something in that general neighbourhood. The ToH example that [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION] gave upthread, for instance - of methodically progressing through the tomb using orc henchmen - fits within the Gygaxian paradigm, but does not involve "quickly blowing through the foregone conclusion".



 Maybe I'm overly cynical & suffering from Post-Traumatic-Edition-War-Disorder, (OK, there is no 'maybe'), but right in the original thread, Daztur came right out and said he was trying to explain the edition war divide.  So, CaW is not a really style being analyzed, so much as one being created to require things perceived as absent from 4e, and be badly hampered by other things perceived to be present in it (and vice-versa for 3e).  

Maybe, if approached from another angle, CaW /would/ have included the meticulous-execution phase of a plan (including dealing with the unexpected), rather than 'needing' to quickly blow through the forgone-conclusion combat at the end.  But, to make it less 'supported by' 4e, it had to require 'fast combats.'  Because 'slow combat' was one of the more-nearly-validcriticisms leveled against 4e at the time (that is, entirely valid only if you discounted the possibility of /ever/ stepping outside the encounter /guidelines/).


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## Hussar (Aug 1, 2014)

I'm not really talking about numbers where using mobs works though.  That's too large a unit.  I'm talking about adding half a dozen NPC's to the group - exactly what hirelings were used for in AD&D.  And, because the power curve in AD&D is much shallower, having a half a dozen 2nd level fighter hirelings with a 7th level group was an effective choice which didn't actually add a whole lot of table time.  

3e is bad and 4e is a lot worse when you do this though.  Even something as simple as a 2nd level fighter in 3e can have 3 or 4 feats, and all sorts of goodies going on.  Imagine adding half a dozen trip monkey fighters to your group and you'll see what I mean.  4e gets even worse, since each of those fighters is now going to have at least two distinct options - basic melee and probably something else, and, lets be honest here, the focus on terrain and the tactical grid is going to eat up a lot of table time.  

Add in the additional bit where it's often a choice for the controlling character - use up my standard action to have my cohort attack, and it gets really slow, really quickly.  Adding a cohort to a character is a very complicated option.  Far, far more complicated than it was in earlier editions.

I'm not saying it can't be done, it certainly can.  But, I'd say that 4e certainly disincentivises the option.  It's just far, far too much of a PITA to be a really good fit for a lot of groups.


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## Iosue (Aug 1, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> OK.  Doesn't sound like CaW anymore, though, because CaW wants to quickly blow through the foregone conclusion at the end of the planning and prep, rather than 'methodically implement'/execute the plan in detail.  And, 4e's handling of detailed tactical set-piece battles would be ideal for tactical execution portion of that 'skilled play.'



"Prep" includes "methodically implement/execute the plan".

Don't confuse quick _resolution_ with "blowing through" the foregone conclusion.  A group may come up with a plan involving two warring goblin tribes to take themselves out.  Individual components of that plan may be methodically implemented -- roleplaying interactions with the goblin chiefs, planning the event that will instigate the fight, securing a escape route.  None of which may take a very long time in real time, by themselves; "methodically" has nothing to do with speed.  Then they light the fuse and watch the two sides go at it.  That is quickly resolved, and then perhaps the PCs engage the remnants of the winning faction, now with the odds in their favor.  Again quickly resolved, but methodically implemented.


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## Campbell (Aug 1, 2014)

Warning: there is a distinct lack of game theory in my post.  When I sit down to play a game I want engaging game play, first and foremost. I also want an emotionally engaging experience, but not at the cost of giving up game play. I don't like a lot of traditional RPGs*, but my two favorite ones are Basic D&D and 4e. I don't particularly care if resolution is scene based or adventure based, but fidelity to game play is paramount to me. Wherever the scope of game play exists I believe it is our job as referees to make sure we have informed players that can make decisions that have a meaningful impact on the play experience, and to bring consequences to bear for those decisions without any kid gloves.

I understand on an academic level that some people do not want that in an RPG, but at a certain level that doesn't really concern me.  I started playing RPGs in the '90s, but I don't really have a desire to go back to GM mitigated decision making. I am concerned that the play style of Classic World of Darkness (and AD&D 2e) is being enshrined, rather than either of the play paradigms which I really enjoy.


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## Aenghus (Aug 1, 2014)

Iosue said:


> "Prep" includes "methodically implement/execute the plan".
> 
> Don't confuse quick _resolution_ with "blowing through" the foregone conclusion.  A group may come up with a plan involving two warring goblin tribes to take themselves out.  Individual components of that plan may be methodically implemented -- roleplaying interactions with the goblin chiefs, planning the event that will instigate the fight, securing a escape route.  None of which may take a very long time in real time, by themselves; "methodically" has nothing to do with speed.  Then they light the fuse and watch the two sides go at it.  That is quickly resolved, and then perhaps the PCs engage the remnants of the winning faction, now with the odds in their favor.  Again quickly resolved, but methodically implemented.




I feel this argument is a bit of a red herring as entirely-NPC faction fights using the combat rules will be slow regardless of the ruleset used. In fact there is no obligation for the DM to use the full RPG combat rules to resolve inter-NPC fighting, effectively impractical past a certain battle size, and as most versions of D&D didn't have mass combat rules , the fallback was to guesstimate the result, which may be informed by but not used the system and can be fast regardless of the system (as the system isn't being used).

PC ambush combat resolution is faster than normal for the system if the ambush is successful, as the PCs focus fire and efficiently roll up their enemies.My experience with DMs that permit planning to victory is that they often insist on formal resolution of everything to do with the PCs, waiting for the PCs to make a mistake or fail a subtask, at which point they can introduce complications or may rule that the plan has failed (to themselves and/or the players). 

Systems do differ on how much they reward successful ambushes, the problem for me being systems that highly reward successful ambushes place the DM in a catch 22 concerning ambushes on the PCs - competent enemies performing a successful ambush on the PCs will likely wipe them out with no chance for PC victory and their best option being running away, which means most enemies need to be passive, incompetent or unstealthy.


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## Iosue (Aug 1, 2014)

Aenghus said:


> I feel this argument is a bit of a red herring as entirely-NPC faction fights using the combat rules will be slow regardless of the ruleset used. In fact there is no obligation for the DM to use the full RPG combat rules to resolve inter-NPC fighting, effectively impractical past a certain battle size, and as most versions of D&D didn't have mass combat rules , the fallback was to guesstimate the result, which may be informed by but not used the system and can be fast regardless of the system (as the system isn't being used).



Slow will be entirely relative.  There's no strict time limit.  The NPC faction fight might be slower than, say, a PC party vs. wandering monster fight, but still fast enough to keep players engaged.  And bear in mind that this is an example; my point is not that some systems handle NPC fights better than others.  It's that you can have a play style that really abstracts the blow-by-blow out so that combat is resolved quickly and the meat of play is in the actions taken before or after that, versus one that really gets down into the blow-by-blow, and prioritizes decision making within combat.  System can be relevant to that, but it's not critical.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 1, 2014)

Iosue said:


> "Prep" includes "methodically implement/execute the plan".



 By definition, preparation does not include execution.  



> Don't confuse quick _resolution_ with "blowing through" the foregone conclusion.



 No confusion involved.   The latter is what CaW has been characterized as 'wanting,' the former is one way of delivering it.



> A group may come up with a plan involving two warring goblin tribes to take themselves out.  Individual components of that plan may be methodically implemented -- roleplaying interactions with the goblin chiefs, planning the event that will instigate the fight, securing a escape route.  None of which may take a very long time in real time, by themselves; "methodically" has nothing to do with speed.  Then they light the fuse and watch the two sides go at it.  That is quickly resolved,



 Well, it's either narrated by the DM (seems like the most reasonable option in any system, since no players are involved with the resolution, both sides are under the DMs control), handled with an ancillary wargamey sub-system, or it takes quite a lot of pointless dice-rolling to resolve.



> and then perhaps the PCs engage the remnants of the winning faction, now with the odds in their favor.  Again quickly resolved, but methodically implemented....
> NPC fights better than others. It's that you can have a play style that really abstracts the blow-by-blow out so that combat is resolved quickly and the meat of play is in the actions taken before or after that, versus one that really gets down into the blow-by-blow, and prioritizes decision making within combat. System can be relevant to that, but it's not critical.



 D&D has always been pretty abstract that way, particularly the 1-minute rounds of 0e/1e and 'action economy' of 4e.  Even 3e itterative and 5e multiple attacks arguably don't get down to individual blows - it's still not entirely plausible that 5 or 6 attack rolls represent /every/ blow in a six-second battle.  You'd have to go to a system like GURPS to get that kind of granularity.

So it's not really much of an issue for D&D - besides, if pre-battle machinations reduce the actual combat to a trivial one, it'll naturally be pretty quick to resolve.



			
				Aenghus said:
			
		

> Systems do differ on how much they reward successful ambushes, the problem for me being systems that highly reward successful ambushes place the DM in a catch 22 concerning ambushes on the PCs - competent enemies performing a successful ambush on the PCs will likely wipe them out with no chance for PC victory and their best option being running away, which means most enemies need to be passive, incompetent or unstealthy.



 The system needn't always use the exact same system for both PCs and their adversaries.  For instance, in classic D&D, PC parties virtually always included casters able to heal or otherwise help a party come back from the devastating first moments of an ambush, while generic 'monsters' are less likely to have such resources (or have so many of them).


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I'm not really talking about numbers where using mobs works though.  That's too large a unit.  I'm talking about adding half a dozen NPC's to the group - exactly what hirelings were used for in AD&D.  And, because the power curve in AD&D is much shallower, having a half a dozen 2nd level fighter hirelings with a 7th level group was an effective choice which didn't actually add a whole lot of table time.



 I guess that's on the assumption that rolling to hit six times, tracking hps for them, and tracking their movement and positioning while they lived was not that big a deal.  That's really a fairly high tolerance for added 'table time' and complexity in resolving combats - double the number of figures to track on the PC side is not trivial.  



> 3e is bad and 4e is a lot worse when you do this though.  Even something as simple as a 2nd level fighter in 3e can have 3 or 4 feats, and all sorts of goodies going on.  Imagine adding half a dozen trip monkey fighters to your group and you'll see what I mean.  4e gets even worse, since each of those fighters is now going to have at least two distinct options - basic melee and probably something else, and, lets be honest here, the focus on terrain and the tactical grid is going to eat up a lot of table time.



 While 3e is notorious for giving monsters and NPC class levels and making them as complicated as PCs, it /did/ give you the Warrior class, which'd be ideal for that kind of things (and reduces them to 1 feat each at 2nd level).  Similarly, Companion characters can be pretty darn simple, and 5-levels-behind creatures are flirting with minionization, which means nothing to track but attack rolls.



> I'm not saying it can't be done, it certainly can.  But, I'd say that 4e certainly disincentives the option.  It's just far, far too much of a PITA to be a really good fit for a lot of groups.



 There's a lot of disincentives to using too many NPCs.  Not just purely mechanical ones like siphoning off exp or consuming resources or whatever.  NPC allies can be inconvenient on a number of levels - their loyalty can be subverted, for instance (or they could be double-agents from the get-go), they can balk at duties, give away information, make group stealth that much harder, and so forth.  Some players may even allow their character's a twinge of conscience for bringing much less capable people into such dangerous situations...


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## Hussar (Aug 1, 2014)

As I recall, hirelings in AD&D didn't actually eat into xp at all.  They simply gained xp at a much slower rate.  Or am I misremembering that from another edition.  Someone with better rules fu than me can look that up.  The Leadership feat in 3e did the same thing, where your followers didn't actually gain or detract from xp at all.

And, as far as NPC's stabbing you in the back, well, that would run fairly counter to a group that wants strategic play.  If the party is interested in that style of play, but the DM starts screwing them over for it, they'll pretty quickly abandon the idea.  As I recall, AD&D had a loyalty rating for hirelings based on your Cha score and different activities you could perform.  Not a bad system as I remember it.


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## Iosue (Aug 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> As I recall, hirelings in AD&D didn't actually eat into xp at all.  They simply gained xp at a much slower rate.  Or am I misremembering that from another edition.  Someone with better rules fu than me can look that up.  The Leadership feat in 3e did the same thing, where your followers didn't actually gain or detract from xp at all.



In AD&D, hirelings didn't cost you XP, but that's because they didn't go into danger with you.  Henchman, OTOH, _did_ cost you XP, because they would go with into danger, as would Expert D&D retainers. It was one of the built in decision points of the game.  The more henchmen/retainers you had, the better your chances to survive, but also the slower your advancement would be.  Risk vs reward pops up in many facets of play.


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## Savage Wombat (Aug 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> As I recall, hirelings in AD&D didn't actually eat into xp at all.  They simply gained xp at a much slower rate.  Or am I misremembering that from another edition.  Someone with better rules fu than me can look that up.  The Leadership feat in 3e did the same thing, where your followers didn't actually gain or detract from xp at all.
> 
> And, as far as NPC's stabbing you in the back, well, that would run fairly counter to a group that wants strategic play.  If the party is interested in that style of play, but the DM starts screwing them over for it, they'll pretty quickly abandon the idea.  As I recall, AD&D had a loyalty rating for hirelings based on your Cha score and different activities you could perform.  Not a bad system as I remember it.




Half of the discussions on this particular topic inevitably make me think of Knights of the Dinner Table.


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## Emerikol (Aug 2, 2014)

Henchman took 1/2 experience but they still divided the total received just like a PC.


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## pemerton (Aug 2, 2014)

Iosue said:


> In AD&D, hirelings didn't cost you XP, but that's because they didn't go into danger with you.



What about mercenary/soldier hirelings? I don't remember any rule addressing the XP issue in respect of them, either in D&D or AD&D, except perhaps the AD&D guidelines for discounting XP based on risk.


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## Iosue (Aug 2, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> By definition, preparation does not include execution.



It does when you have multi-phase plans.  Lots of moving parts, mini-plans to execute the larger plan, making adjustments to account for complications.  To use Ocean's 11 as an example, the plan itself is made very early on and relayed to Brad Pitt after the poker game.  The lion's share of the movie is them then methodically executing that plan, much of it involving the prep for the actual heist, which is carried out in the film's climax.



> No confusion involved.   The latter is what CaW has been characterized as 'wanting,' the former is one way of delivering it.



"Blow through" has a nuance of rushing by, not giving something the usual amount of time and attention, which is really not appropriate here.  In any style, be that CaW or CaS, or any other style one might suggest, the ideal is that something takes just as long or just as short a time as necessary and desired.  



> Well, it's either narrated by the DM (seems like the most reasonable option in any system, since no players are involved with the resolution, both sides are under the DMs control), handled with an ancillary wargamey sub-system, or it takes quite a lot of pointless dice-rolling to resolve.



Yes.  The exact resolution system for this particular thing is unimportant.  The important thing is where the decision points are.



> D&D has always been pretty abstract that way, particularly the 1-minute rounds of 0e/1e and 'action economy' of 4e.  Even 3e itterative and 5e multiple attacks arguably don't get down to individual blows - it's still not entirely plausible that 5 or 6 attack rolls represent /every/ blow in a six-second battle.  You'd have to go to a system like GURPS to get that kind of granularity.



Yes, but the degree of abstractness varies from edition to edition.  OD&D and Expert are probably the most abstract, 3e and 4e the most granular (it's very much my position that greater HP numbers of 3e and 4e did not make PCs and monsters more powerful, but rather allowed for greater granularity in combat).  AD&D (1st and 2nd edition) fall in the middle, depending on how much wanted to use spell casting times, weapon speeds, and the like.



pemerton said:


> What about mercenary/soldier hirelings? I don't remember any rule addressing the XP issue in respect of them, either in D&D or AD&D, except perhaps the AD&D guidelines for discounting XP based on risk.




The hireling/henchman distinction in AD&D (or specialist/retainer distinction in Expert D&D) falls between those who provide logistic support (hirelings) and those who join the party (henchmen).  Mercenary/soldier hirelings are meant to guard strongholds and camps, rather than invade the dungeon or provide protection in the wilderness.  You could, certainly, take a man-at-arms or sergeant into the dungeon with you, but they would then perforce be part of the party as henchmen, and take a share of XP.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 2, 2014)

Iosue said:


> It does when you have multi-phase plans.  Lots of moving parts, mini-plans to execute the larger plan, making adjustments to account for complications.



 Planning and execution could occur in phases, sure.  You could  plan, execute, adjust plans and execute them.  Planning and execution are distinct, though you could cycle through them faster and faster...  By the time you're doing them virtually simultaneously, you're on to tactics, and have left strategic focus behind.



> "Blow through" has a nuance of rushing by, not giving something the usual amount of time and attention,



 Yes.  That's why I chose it.  'Fast combat' for it's own sake evokes that connotation.   From the original article:



			
				CaW said:
			
		

> But probably most importantly, 4ed combat just takes too damn long for Combat as War players. If you’re going to spend your time doing sneaky rat bastard Black Company stuff before combat starts, then having combat take a long time is just taking time away from the fun bits of play.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...fference-in-D-amp-D-Play-Styles#ixzz39Fny98HU



 Execution, as far as combat, in any case, is de-valued.




> Yes, but the degree of abstractness varies from edition to edition.  OD&D and Expert are probably the most abstract, 3e and 4e the most granular (it's very much my position that greater HP numbers of 3e and 4e did not make PCs and monsters more powerful, but rather allowed for greater granularity in combat). AD&D (1st and 2nd edition) fall in the middle, depending on how much wanted to use spell casting times, weapon speeds, and the like.



 Greater hps in 3e were prettymuch just inflation, I think.  In 4e, they were intentionally to extend combats (in terms of rounds) enough to open up dynamic combats and allow tactical decisions to be meaningful.  But as far as levels of abstraction go, D&D has always been very abstract, and drawing lines between editions is pretty nearly pointless.  Though, I guess, on the conceptual level, 4e's separation of fluff and mechanics in powers is an extra level of abstraction other editions didn't resort to.


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## Iosue (Aug 3, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Planning and execution could occur in phases, sure.  You could  plan, execute, adjust plans and execute them.  Planning and execution are distinct, though you could cycle through them faster and faster...  By the time you're doing them virtually simultaneously, you're on to tactics, and have left strategic focus behind.



But we're not, or at least I'm not, talking about planning vs. execution, but rather prep vs. execution.  Pemerton suggested that a good description of operational play was "select a target/mission, choose the right equipment and spells, plan it  out, and then methodolically proceed to implement that plan."  You then suggested that this didn't sound like CaW because CaW "blows through" the foregone conclusion of the planning and prep, rather than methodically implement/execute that plan.  My whole point is that the prep of the plan is part of its execution.



Tony Vargas said:


> Yes.  That's why I chose it.  'Fast combat' for it's own sake evokes that connotation.



That's why I disagree with your choice of words.  It presumes a) that there is a "right" amount of time to spent on combat, b) that this is a longer time than that spent by CaW advocates, and c) they are thus rushing through it by not spending that time.  I disagree with that premise.  Likewise, I would not agree with a characterization of 4e play as "drawing out combat".  Objectively, there is no standard for how long combats should take.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 4, 2014)

Iosue said:


> Pemerton suggested that a good description of operational play was "select a target/mission, choose the right equipment and spells, plan it  out, and then methodolically proceed to implement that plan."  You then suggested that this didn't sound like CaW because CaW "blows through" the foregone conclusion of the planning and prep, rather than methodically implement/execute that plan.  My whole point is that the prep of the plan is part of its execution.



 Once you've split that hair, you're /still/ blowing through the remaining half of it.




> That's why I disagree with your choice of words.  It presumes a) that there is a "right" amount of time to spent on combat, b) that this is a longer time than that spent by CaW advocates, and c) they are thus rushing through it by not spending that time.



Not at all. CaW assumes that there's a 'right' amount of time spend on combat (for CaW), and that it's very little time.  I provided a direct quote to that from the original article.  That's inconsistent with the idea of methodical planning, prep, /and/ (the rest of) execution.  



> Likewise, I would not agree with a characterization of 4e p lay as "drawing out combat".  Objectively, there is no standard for how long combats should take.



Agreed.   4e specifically addressed an issue with 3e combats becoming 'static,' by increasing the importance of tactics by:  eliminating full-round actions (so creatures could move while still attacking at full effectiveness), adding 'riders' & minor-action powers  so that characters could perform other tactically meaningful actions without unduly sacrificing DPR/'action,' formalizing involuntary movement (so positioning could potentially be needed every round), and increasing hps relative to damage dealt (to avoid 'rocket tag' and allow combats to be long enough in rounds for tactics to matter).  Some or all of that has been construed as making combats take 'too long' (which, again, I agree borders on nonsense, since there's no definitive 'right' duration for combats), and the original CaW article re-iterates that criticism.


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## Hussar (Aug 4, 2014)

Let's be fair though.  You could probably shave off some of the time 4e combats take and not lose much in the way of tactical depth and go a long way towards making a lot of people happier with the system.  Me, personally, I blame the plethora of interrupt actions that PC's can take.  It's such a huge time drag to constantly have to stop after virtually every action and look around the table to make sure no one's going to jump in with some interrupt of some sort.

And then you have the whole "Wait, I can do something about that if you want?  Do you want me to or should I save it for later?  Is now a good time?  What do you think" conversation which can become mind bogglingly annoying after the fifteenth time.  

I would be very, very happy if 4e ejected about 90% of the off turn actions, or went the Warlord route of being able to grant actions during your turn, rather than stopping other people's actions in the middle.

I love that 4e broke the mould of the round and turn being discrete units, but, IMO, they went way too far with it.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Let's be fair though.  You could probably shave off some of the time 4e combats take and not lose much in the way of tactical depth and go a long way towards making a lot of people happier with the system.  Me, personally, I blame the plethora of interrupt actions that PC's can take.  It's such a huge time drag to constantly have to stop after virtually every action and look around the table to make sure no one's going to jump in with some interrupt of some sort.



 That might well speed up combat (OTOH, it might not speed it up, much, it depends on how well the group handles such options), but, it would also eliminate some of that tactical depth.  How the increased speed stacks up to the loss of tactical depth depends on the group.  

On the plus side, if a group decides that such powers aren't worth the extra time, they could avoid choosing them, and the DM could, likewise, avoid having monsters use such powers.


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