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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9368471" data-attributes="member: 7026617">The vast majority of ones I saw didn't have much in the way of class features (including ones that were in PrCs) that really had much to do with non-combat; often what ones were there were all about making what few non-combat elements existed more combat relevant.Edit: I want to expand on this a little, because I want to make clear what I'm saying.What I'm not saying is that the core D&D mechanics are any worse than most RPGs in combat focus.  Combat almost always gets, if not the lion's share of a game, a disproportionate amount of focus compared to any theoretically similarly relevant area; a game with a particular emphasis might give one or two others a bit of comparable love (vehicle use in a Mad Max style game or hacking in a cyberpunk game), but for reasons a bit outside relevance here, combat has a big footprint.What you don't get in non-class based games is the biggest proportion of character capability baked into that combat.  Probably every character will be able to swing a sword or toss off a combat spell if its a fantasy game, but that can end up taking up a very limited amount  of character design resource--in some games its just a skill or two among many other skills.  A character can invest more in combat relevant resource if he wants to, but its not baked in the way classes tend to in class systems, D&D in particular.  If someone wants to focus on other things, he's not wasting a bunch of abilities he has that he'll never use.  As such, there's not as much baked in encouragement to make most sessions about combat for every character (it can be for some characters, which can create a problem if there are characters built for minimal combat and those build for heavy combat use, but that's a case of setting campaign tone and expectations like everything else.  But in D&D those expectations are set right out of the gate because of class design).</blockquote>

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