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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6023844" data-attributes="member: 6688937">Yes. Yes it is. For most of D&D's history, such a character is represented as an NPC, traditionally a "0-level" NPC. D&D's core design concept for the party is a group of quasi-protagonistic tomb-robbers...err...adventurers acting like a fantasy special ops team. Character Level is a generalized measure of a PC's ability to stomp on the bad guys and defy traps and other hazards. The centrality of the tomb-robbing part has varied a bit over the years, but the adventure part hasn't.I realize that people play D&D in a wide variety of playstyles and with a wide variety of motives. However, the concept of Fantasy High-Adventure is pretty central to the design of the game. I can't think of any edition (barring Dragon articles or the near-infinite splat material) where playing a "I don't fight or contribute to fights" is an easily workable concept (maybe a wizard who refuses to cast spells?).If you and your group are not interested in that...then, and I mean this  earnestly... maybe this isn't the game you are looking for. (FATE,  Burning Wheel, I'm sure there are others...) I don't suggest that lightly, either. I'd love to have a FATE group going, but AFAICT, I'm the only one in my area interested. However, if your group is interested in going that far afield of the D&D script, you might want to consider it.Okay so...You don't want to swap a combat specialty/feat for more OoC/Background stuff, but then you do? Is it just the idea they might not be called the same thing? If they are separated into Columns A and B, then adding items to Column B that say "get more from Column A" has got to be one of the easiest houserules I can think of (if it isn't core from the get go.) But then you seem to be objecting to that as "an appropriate answer"...I think the critical thing about this is that the relative desirability of abilities between the three pillars varies a lot between campaigns/characters, making it very difficult to balance between the pillars.* However, the combat stuff is always desirable to a large portion of the audience ("my character's survival is at stake!"). Putting them both in the same pile means that many players will feel obliged to always select the maximum-value Combat choices, and ignore OoC stuff ("trap options", etc.) In this way, a lack of siloing decreases viable character concepts for a large segment of the audience, turning every character into a combat machine. (I know that's not realistic behavior for humans...but then D&D PCs are pretty far from realistic anyway.)Because of the "survivability trump", I further think that these exchanges should be one-way. That is, you should be not be able to trade RP or Exploration abilities for increased Combat effectiveness. Doing so makes it very difficult to produce a reasonably predictable game at all.** Also, "punchyness" ?*For example, I, as a DM, am not terribly fond of traps, but I do love NPC interactions. I suspect my games distinctly "imbalance" the two OoC pillars of Exploration and Role-Playing. Not that anyone complains....<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.**The entirety of my thinking on this matter is predicated on the general structure and habits of D&D. Plenty of other games have structures and design goals where such siloing would be counterproductive or nonsensical, yet other games have structures and designs where entirely different siloing is effective..</blockquote>

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