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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahglock" data-source="post: 4068622" data-attributes="member: 56725">I'll try to elaborate, but its basically comes down to personal preference and game style.your first point "There may be games where this type of 'balance' is right, but D&D is not that game. It never really has been. Well, it has been (attempted to be) balanced that way, and that level of balance also caused various levels of fun."To me D&D has always been about this, maybe the rules implemented it worse than I would of liked in earlier editions but even in Basic D&D it was there.  Weaker combat classes got more non-combat benefits, the fighter got an army and land, the rogue got a guild, the wizard got a tower with a few apprentices.  Not a great job of balancing but it was there to some extent.  3e did a better job, but the social skills at high levels got wierd to me.  "D&D focuses on the combat"Well my games don't, only at the lowest levels has combat been a large part of the game.  As the parties ability resources increased they used those abilities to solve there problems with as little fighting as possible since they would prefer not to die. "Every player should be able to contribute and have fun during combat. IMO, penalizing combat to balance a character's social skills is not the right answer."I agree every player should contribute and have fun in combat, I just don't think equal contribution is necessary.  I wouldn't phrase it as social skills, I'd expand it to all non-combat skills.  If your non-combat abilites are large you should lose out on combat abilities, if your combat abilities are large you should lose out on non-combat abilities.  Both are important to having fun in my games, but if the non-combat experts were as good as the combat experts at fighting the combat experts would have problems.  And while it can sound good to try and balance both separately so everyone contributes as equally as possible in and out of combat I don't think it fits the character concepts that most if not all of my players want to play.  They don't want to play the guy who is as good as everyone else in combat and just as good out of combat, they want to play the negotiations expert, or the master swordsman, or the sneak.  If the sneak hacks people to pieces just as good as the master swordsman, the master swordsman says whiskey tango foxtrot.  I have yet to see one of my players even think it is a problem when his sneak hacks a bit worse than the master swordsman, since that was not his focus.  He'd be irritated if the master swordsman was basically as good of a sneak as he was.  I'm not saying this wrecks 4e or anything, but I do believe out of combat is just as important if not more than combat.  Certain character concepts focus more on out of combat abilites and people should be able to excel at those things if they want to, but if they want to excel at that it should come at a cost, and that usually will be there combat ability.  Similarly there are character concepts that excel in combat, so there should be a cost for that as well.</blockquote>

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