NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4284469" data-attributes="member: 710">Some people think "role-playing is what happens between combat". If that was true, why did D&D evolve from war-gaming? Why are there basically no RPGs void of combat rules?My definition goes more like this:"Role-Playing Games have something happening between combats". There is a reason why D&D - the first role-playing game ever - did not evolve from book clubs or a writers guild meeting, but from war-gamers. The combat part is important. But the role-playing part makes the combat more then an exercise in number-crunching. It provides us with a theme and a motivation. We fight the Orcs not because it's fun fighting Orcs (though it is, on the meta-game level), but because we're hoping to rescue the captured children and end their terror regime on the local village. The reason why my character fights Orcs is because they killed his family. And he fights them with a sword instead of magic because a soldier found him in the middle of a pillaged village and adopted him. But some people still believe that you could do away with the "combat" part and claim that this would make you somehow a "superior" role-player. That's not true. It is a role-playing game. If you take away the role-playing, it's just a game (maybe a board game, a card game, or a dice game). If you take away the game, it's nothing more then telling a story.Some people accuse D&D or other players that they don't embrace the role-playing in role-playing games. I'll accuse them of not embracing the game in role-playing games. And I claim that D&D - in all editions - tried to embrace both aspects. And 3E and 4E so far look like the best implementations.</blockquote>

Verification