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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3442833" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, I wouldn't personally list CoC as a RP heavy game system.  Most horror games, at least the ones I've played (CoC, Chill 2nd Edition) are geared more to 'problem solvers' than 'method actors' or other sorts of pure role players.  That's not to say that I haven't done RP in those systems (I have), or even that good RP doesn't help solve problems (because in my experience it does), but just that a gamer that was looking for an RP campaign heavy on the inter-personal drama might not be finding it in CoC especially whereas the sort of gamer that was a problem solver (the sort that likes traps, puzzles, and riddles in D&D) almost certainly would.I personally think that VtM as it was written seemed intended to be an RP centered, RP driven game, but in my experience it didn't actually end up that way necessarily.  It did have mechanics geared specifically to RP, and relatively little time was spent on its combat system.  But in practice, I found it normally played something more like the Matrix movies (violent Superheroes in black leather) than an actual character driven drama.  Again, I return to my assertion that how much RP you have is a factor of the group and not the game.  As an example in the opposite direction, I've heard it reported that many super-heroes groups often end up in high melodrama RP centered games, if not despite the fact that supers games tend to have highly detailed combat systems then in fact because running such math intensive and complex combats is such a chore that it winnows out all the groups looking for tactical combat heavy gaming.If I may throw out an assertion likely to attract alot of flames from the knee-jerkers out there, I personally think D&D is a better more flexible system for accomodating groups of just about any style of play than just about any system that is out there and that this is precisely the secret of D&D's success.  Just because it was first was no gaurantee that it would stay the industry leader.  Lots of things come first and end up second.  But the reason it stayed first (among others I could name), is that if you want to play a combat heavy game - D&D (famously) accomodates you.  If you want to play an RP heavy game - D&D accomodates you by virtue of being rules light enough from an RP side that nothing gets in the way.  If you want to switch back and forth between those styles, its no big deal.  Alot of systems out there just can't support both as easily, either because the combat is too deadly (anything going for 'realism' tends to result in this) or the combat system to arduous to resolve or the social rules are tightly woven into the game and annoy or abstract into die rolls more often than they smooth or invigorate RP.  The one aspect of D&D rules that actually impinge on RP is alignment, and this seems to bother some people.  It doesn't bother me, and I have an infamously low regard for the sort of people who are bothered by D&D's alignment system, so I won't go thier and thread derail, but a rather large number of groups have happily thrown alignment out of the D&D game with what I presume are few ill effects.  So, in short, I don't think there is anything in the D&D game that prevents you from playing whatever sort of game you want, with the possible exception of 'realistic'.And that brings us back to D&D's prolific healing, the whole point of which is to make D&D combats as unrealistic as possible.  The reason of course is that realistic combat has many potentially long term negative consequences which more or less wreck a person's ability to continue in top fighting form for a very long time.  Healing is there to provide a 'get out of the hospital free' card to the player, so that not only can he get back into participating in the story but he doesn't have to dispose of the character and get a new one.   So long as you have the goal of getting players back into the story as quickly as possible and disposing of characters as little as possible, you are going to need some equivalent mechanism.  It just so happens that in D&D, it's healing.</blockquote>

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