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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6464006" data-attributes="member: 177">With respect, this branch of the discussion started with Celtavian saying: "Combat is always and has always been the largest pillar by a huge margin in any edition of D&D. A DM might adjust that if his group does not mind. My group likes combat. They don't like to spend very much time on out of combat material. I very much doubt a very sizeable majority does not play exactly the same way. That is why combat balance should always be one of the largest factors in RPG design that involves combat simulations decided by numbers. Combat is the equivalent of glory in an RPG. He who kills the most and fastest accumulates for himself the most glory."Which is a discussion of how the game was played.You came back with a discussion of rules.  In context, the implication being that the way the rules were designed indicated the mode of play.  I am questioning the solidity of that implication.Do you wish to claim that you did not intend that implication?  If so, then I will point out that without it, this branch of discussion does nothing to refute Celtavian's point, and is largely a red-herring rabbit hole.  His assertion about the primacy of the combat pillar would then remain, and is supported by the weight of rules on combat.But treasure for XP isn't activity-independent.  It is highly activity-dependent.  The activity being "gather treasure"!  That's a pretty specific activity.I have an alternate narrative for you.  It starts with:  Gygax and Arneson weren't actually great game designers.  Visionary, perhaps, but their actual game design, in retrospect, is pretty shoddy.  D&D came out of wargaming.  Wargaming *is* all about the combat, thus the name.  With that history, their rules are, for the most part, all about combat.  This is not by well-considered design intent, but due to weight of history. Other bits were slapped on as they saw need.  Sometimes, the bits slapped on didn't really fit very well.  Thus, we get a ruleset that has the vast majority of its rules about combat, but the rules setting what passes for the game's win condition disjoint from the bulk of the rules!  It is as if someone published Monopoly with the rules as they are, but the win condition was, "Whoever draws the most Chance cards in five tiems around the board wins."  The bulk of the rules are largely tangential to the activity that wins.If someone tried to publish a game with that kind of mismatch today, they'd get laughed at as rank amateurs.  And that's the key - Gygax and Arneson were amateurs.  There were no practiced professionals at the time.  With such design flaws, it is no wonder we argue about which pillar was primary.  The fact of the matter being that the designers didn't have a good handle on the pillars, or how to balance them or aim the game for one over the other!  That understanding only came with time, and is not extant in the early editions.Here's another support for my thought on the matter.  I quote <a href="http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4131/roleplaying-games/reactions-to-odd-experience-points" target="_blank">the Alexandrian</a>:  "Interesting fact about the basic rules for experience point awards in OD&D: They don’t actually exist.Instead you have to intuit them out of an example on pg. 18 of Volume 1: Men & Magic, which states that you would get 7,700 XP for killing a troll with 7,000 gp of treasure: 7,000 XP for the 7,000 GP + 700 for killing the troll (which is a 7th level monster).From this example you are forced to intuit that PCs receive 1 XP per gold piece of treasure and 100 XP per level of a defeated monster. (A monster’s level is basically determined by its Hit Dice.)"When they don't even actually state the rule, do you trust that the rule is designed with well-considered intent?</blockquote>

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