Afrodyte
Explorer
I've made those threads, but they've either been ignored or dismissed as (semi-)impossible.
Why do D&D players put such an emphasis on rules and tactics?
I've made those threads, but they've either been ignored or dismissed as (semi-)impossible.
Yora
Legend
There are almost never any posts when you look, so you stop looking.
It's not that people don't talk about ideas for backgrounds, creating adventures, and running campaigns. They just don't do it here so much.
All this bitterness about the place of combat in the game. I don't understand why combat is regarded as so objectionable - it's a major site of conflict in a lot of other action dramas, why not in RPGing?
If you read the action resolution rules in classic D&D, you'll see that they also heavily emphasise combat (particularly when you take into account all the spell descriptions). Likewise 5e. Besides combat, B/X D&D has resolution mechanics only for thief abilities, dealing with traps, dealing with doors, overland movement, and reactions. 1st ed AD&D also has loyalty mechanics plus rangers' tracking.
4e is the only edition to have a general mechanical framework for resolving non-combat activity (the skill challenge - which is the closest D&D has ever got to a game like Fate or HeroWars/Quest).
Neonchameleon
Legend
As I understand it, there are three reasons.
1: If you're playing ToTM (which D&D isn't terribly good at but you can do in any edition) then there isn't much of a gear change between combat and non-combat. 4e has two distinct modes of play (and the out of combat one is not explained).
2: Combat takes too long. More accurately combat takes too long per round. Which means that keeping the energy up is harder. 3.X you could handle about half a high level combat (the buff phase) between sessions or through SOPs. AD&D might have sometimes turned into a whiff-fest but the turns came back round relatively fast, meaning that even if you weren't doing much you were doing something regularly.
3: Analysis Paralysis. People prone to Analysis Paralysis didn't have a class for them that wouldn't bog the entire pace down until Essentials. One in a group could be a problem. Two could kill the game.
That suggests, to me at least, that there are few interested in making such posts. There are lots of posts on other topics. Did discussion of damage on a miss slow down when that was moved to its own forum?
And number 4, it drowns out everything else. When you have a book filled to 90% with combat rules, what are players most likely to do in game even when they have a choice? As for economic reasons WotC won't print huge 400 pages books, it means that the non combat part will be lacking as too much space is spend on myriads of combat options.
Neonchameleon
Legend
90% full of combat rules? The combat rules in 4e take from page 264 to page 294 in the PHB - or less than 10% of the PHB
If you've somehow confused the combat rules with the character class rules, those take from page 50 to page 175 or just under 40% of the PHB. Which is the approximate percentage 1e, 2e, and 3e gave over to spells.
+ All the combat powers for each class
+ All the combat spells
+ All the magic items used for combat
Neonchameleon
Legend
As I said, the class rules take up 125 pages. That covers both all the combat powers, and a lot of non-combat powers.
Meanwhile for any sort of balanced comparison, you must include every single combat spell in your preferred edition of D&D (after all you're doing this for 4e) and the sections of the DMG that include combat magic items.
Considering that my point was that D&D in general always was more of a wargame I do not see the point in comparing a D&D edition with a other D&D edition.
You were the one who started to be edition specific.
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