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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thasmodious" data-source="post: 4322752" data-attributes="member: 63272">What you read into the responses is not the same thing as what people are saying.  Responding that, if your game finds a need for a crafting system to make one up is not people saying "non combat is irrelevant, we live only to kill things".  It's a matter of what we need a set of rules to accomplish.  4e is not focused solely on combat.  It is focused on conflict resolution because that is where dice and rules need to enter the situation.  It is focused around the encounter.  The text even says so.  It is not a typical component of D&D games for the outcome of an encounter to require crafting, or tunneling for months through the earth or a realistic model of a real world medieval economy or any of the others things some claim are missing from 4e (why, oh why, did they get rid of the 1e Assassination Table, that was the best subsystem ever!).  What they did was present a nice, concise set of rules to handle encounters and conflict and give the DM the tools he needs to adjudicate anything else that comes up.  It is ridiculously easy to develop a quick craft system based off the DC by Level tables in the DMG to handle that time it comes up in the middle of the game.  That the PC is a capable crafter of lyres is something that is handled through roleplaying, not mechanics.  Mechanics don't have to support everything a character can do, just the things he needs to do while doing the things that characters are built to do in a D&D game.  No two gaming groups are going to agree anyway on just what is or isn't necessary, outside of combat and non combat encounter resolution, for the game to include.  No matter how many subsystems are crammed into the book, gamers with your mindset will still find plenty of others missing.  There were tons of things, actions, and playstyles that 3e didn't have rules to emulate.  DMs who found those important made them up.  And they also spent some time on the internet whining that these things were "missing" from the game, as if it can all things to all gamers.  It can't.  And the more it tries, the more complexities it requires, the more rules conflicts crop up between these subsystems and each other or the core rules, and the more corner cases are created and exceptions needed to "solve" them.  That the designers made a decision not to fall into this trap this time around and focus on the core gameplay elements and trust the large community of gamers, websites devoted to gaming, and 3rd party publishers to cover all these disparate playstyles.  That was exactly what the 3e OGL taught them.  Most of their subpar subsystems just served as launching points for the excellent group of 3rd party publishers to produce some great products that covered these niche playstyles, subsystems, etc.  For example, there are some great rulesets out there for pirate/high seas fantasy games.  The only way you can really do such a playstyle justice is with more than a half a page blurb in the DMG and a table or two.  It requires some room and effort and the return is minimal.  Not that many groups favor that playstyle.  So its the perfect venue for third party publishers to cover.This isn't a fault, or an omission, or the "influence of video games", it's a design feature and shows an understanding of D&Ds audience and the abilities and creativity of players, DMs, and the players and DMs who become third party publishers.</blockquote>

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