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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nathal" data-source="post: 487463" data-attributes="member: 1809">I never used the word totally nor did I write anything about only brute strength and toe-to-toe close melee combat being the only way to be useful on the battlefield.  I DO say that "game balance" is of major concern to D&D within the context of battle and that the phrase has little utility outside of that context to most players.  One way you can tell that D&D is geared toward combat is by noting how each class goes up in hit points, attack bonus, etc.  This prevents even the least melee capable character from getting killed in a single swipe of an enemy's sword.  It does not matter that some classess are less inclined to do massive damage in close combat with melee weapons; all classes in D&D have the potential to do serious damage to their foes in their own way.  None can be made deliberately weak by the player unless the GM allows them to play an NPC commoner or something.  Would you play an NPC expert over a Fighter class?  Does not the DMG recommend against that sort of thing?   No, the reason everybody gets the same experience is because the game is combat oriented.  If the lions share of the xp went only to those fighting in close melee combat, did not consider supportive roles such as sneak attacks, magic and healing magic, then it would be a more deadly game system.  Why? Because characters would quickly be of disparate levels which kills game balance in the context of combat.  Campaigns with wildly varying levels tend to be deadly for the lower level characters.  A GM would be unwise to run a combat-heavy campaign with a group of characters who were not near to each other in level.   Again, I did not claim that D&D had no other aspect to its play than combat.  I wrote that it is a combat-oriented game because it assures no one character is too weak when compared to others of equal level.  Not all games have such safeguards against a quick character death and the reason is that those systems are less combat oriented and thus more deadly to characters who rush into battle.Not to sound like a broken record, but anybody that makes the claim that D&D is "only" about combat is wrong.  I do not make that claim.  I say it is VERY combat oriented.  That leaves all the other aspects of a role-playing game in there of course, but the class-and-level system itself promotes a sort of game balance in combat that favors a battle-heavy sort of game.  Point based systems allow a player to make a character that would not only be less effective in battle, but would likely die from a single strike of an experience warriors sword!  Game Masters would either have to advise players against players creating weaklings or rogue scholars in such a game or keep actual battle to a minimum.  Most D&D campaigns are not all about mystery and intrique with very little battle, and if it is then it is played that way in spite of its primary focus (but NOT its only focus).  I've played in D&D games where combat was very much downplayed and the DM was excellent in some ways, but my statistics really didn't matter much and neither did advancement.  He didn't even bother giving out experience points for battle and because battle was so deadly it didn't really matter if I was 1st or 10th level.I would have prefered to dump D&D in that case for a system that was point-based and with a wider selection of skills for the sort of situations he put us up against.  It wasn't that D&D was a bad game or couldn't handle his DMing at all, no!  The problem was that advancement in D&D grants character power ascention, but in his world greater power meant only greater threat and required more caution.  In most D&D campaigns the characters tend to be become rather cocky and brazen in their dealings with NPCS as their power grows.  DMs are then forced to come up with house rules to deal with situations like the capture a 13th level character by a band of 1st level warriors who have him cornered with crossbows aimed and ready to fire at his throat if he so much as twitches.  I don't care what class that high level character is, chances are he could take a full round of every one of those warriors firing on him at point blank range and still kill several of them (if not all) in return before running of to safety.  In a gritty, realistic game that character would be dead if he was corned with soldiers with crossbows.  D&D is about heroic fantasy and supports that sort of game best.  Campaigns that deal less with battle, valor, monsters, and traps may do better with a different rule set. Right, so I imagine that the outcome of CoC would be very different when adapated to D20, although I have not played it and would be interested in some response to this idea.  Chaosium CoC is a good example of a game whose idea of "game balance" is not what most players think of when creating a character in something like D&D.</blockquote>

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