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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6464560" data-attributes="member: 5834">Because something can be done, does not mean it was the preferred or encouraged way of playing. Why we're having an argument about whether D&D was originally combat focused is unbelievable. You're talking up stealth, deception, trickery, and the like, yet not many classes were equipped to handle things in this manner. Even the rogue at early levels had an extremely low percentage chance of accomplishing all of those things. The fighter had almost no chance. The wizard was extremely limited in spell choice and capability. You couldn't be a 1st level bard in the original game. The bard was a dual class option. Very few people focused on charisma or intelligence as a stat unless it was necessary to their class.This attempt by you and a few others to paint D&D as other than a combat-focused game is an attempt at an incredulous argument for reasons I can't comprehend. Pulling pages from the DMG for handling social interactions could be easily be countered by all the combat rules, text and magical combat spells that exists in the game. No one is pulling those pages because they exist everywhere. On top of that there were entire books dedicated to nothing but monsters. The designers spent all that time on the Monster Manual's, so you could talk to monsters and avoid them. All those combat statistics for various monsters existing as merely a pointless exercise by game designers that knew that D&D parties would spend more time avoiding monsters than fighting them.Then there are modules they wasted their time on like Keep on the Borderlands, Temple of Elemental Evil, and the like where they shouldn't have bothered with all those monster combat encounters rather spending all their time providing rules and methods for ending each encounter by either talking or stealthing, because of course the majority of parties were playing that way. All those combat encounters and defeating the evil threat was just window dressing for players that were supposed to spend the majority of their high stats on charisma and intelligence for resolving these encounters without combat."I'm a fighter? Let me put that 18 on charisma and intelligence. I'll rarely need my strength. We want to avoid combat.""We found a +3 sword and gauntlets of ogre power? I don't really need those. Is there a book or something that lets me use my charisma or intelligence to win encounters? Fighting is not what we do. We're supposed to talk and sneak all time. I don't know why I'm wearing this plate mail."These attempts to make D&D appear as game where everyone snuck around or talked to avoid combat are incredulous to say the least.I'm done with this. I think I've more than made my point. I doubt any poll or study of the game would show anything other than a vast majority of players dating back across all editions spend over 50% of their time (probably well over) in combat. But since I do not intend to pursue that study as I am not one to doubt its truth, I will leave that to people like Sacrosanct and The Jester who played D&D very differently from all the people I played with over the years at gaming stores, conventions, and in my own groups. It was very rare to find a group that didn't spend the majority of their time on combat, though I will not say they did not exist as I met a few. It certainly wasn't anywhere near the majority. Those groups rarely ran the rules as they were designed. Almost everything in those groups was decided by DM whim. I didn't see a massive use of social die rolls until 3rd edition. My groups and the majority of groups I played with ignored morale and mostly allowed a role-playing situation to be resolved if the player did a good job role-playing (another reason I like 5E because it incorporates that type of social resolution). It wasn't fun to have creatures run and have to track them in any edition.I chalk this up to another example of the pointlessness of arguing on the internet. You always find that handful of people that want to continue an argument that has no basis in fact to the bitter end.</blockquote>

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