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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8411180" data-attributes="member: 7006">D&amp;D is a game about monster combat.&nbsp; That's why an entire book is dedicated to presenting foes for characters to fight and 90% of a character sheet is statistics about how well the characters can fight.&nbsp; Thus options besides combat will always be much, much further down the list of things the PCs will choose to do than fighting stuff is.&nbsp; Combat will always be option #1, because that's how the game has been built.And thus... any rules that kill or destroy characters really easily (and thus really often) are ultimately pointless.&nbsp; Because then D&amp;D ultimately becomes the board game that it already has in its background-- you have your &quot;playing piece&quot; for a session, you lose the game, the &quot;playing piece&quot; goes away, and then next game you start with a new &quot;playing piece&quot;.&nbsp; If this is actually what most players of D&amp;D wanted, the game wouldn't have evolved away from that paradigm so quickly and easily and so continuously over the last 40 years, with new rules constantly being added so that your &quot;playing piece&quot; character doesn't die and reset each session and you can see it stick around a long, long time (perhaps even the entirety of a campaign.)If people want to play D&amp;D combat as a board game with no character memory and a reset of a new playing piece each game session... that's why WotC's tried to make the 'miniatures combat game' a thing in both 3E and 4E's eras.&nbsp; And in both cases they gained no traction in the marketplace.&nbsp; Because that is not actually what 99.99% of D&amp;D players want.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 8411180, member: 7006"] D&D is a game about monster combat. That's why an entire book is dedicated to presenting foes for characters to fight and 90% of a character sheet is statistics about how well the characters can fight. Thus options besides combat will always be much, much further down the list of things the PCs will choose to do than fighting stuff is. Combat will always be option #1, because that's how the game has been built. And thus... any rules that kill or destroy characters really easily (and thus really often) are ultimately pointless. Because then D&D ultimately becomes the board game that it already has in its background-- you have your "playing piece" for a session, you lose the game, the "playing piece" goes away, and then next game you start with a new "playing piece". If this is actually what most players of D&D wanted, the game wouldn't have evolved [I]away[/I] from that paradigm so quickly and easily and so continuously over the last 40 years, with new rules constantly being added so that your "playing piece" character doesn't die and reset each session and you can see it stick around a long, long time (perhaps even the entirety of a campaign.) If people want to play D&D combat as a board game with no character memory and a reset of a new playing piece each game session... that's why WotC's tried to make the 'miniatures combat game' a thing in both 3E and 4E's eras. And in both cases they gained no traction in the marketplace. Because that is not actually what 99.99% of D&D players want. [/QUOTE]

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