Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6373137" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'm not really trying to make a statement about what D&D is, I'm just describing the fact that rules support tells you what has a big effect and what you do a lot of in a game because the major reasons you HAVE rules is to keep big effects fair and to keep common activities interesting. This might not be the intent of the writers, especially not consciously, but it is the game that they're writing. Why do we need combat rules at all?As far as I can see, it is because the consequences are huge and the activity is supposed to be pretty regular.In D&D specifically, the consequences of character death (permadeath!) are rather tremendous: you will never be able to play that character again. So because of that, the rules for how and when a character dies (mostly, through combat, but occasionally other things) received more attention, to make life and death more equitable (the rules for trap-finding and the like are nearly as detailed in certain e's: 10-foot poles and whatnot). Additionally, fights happen regularly: monsters are there to be fought and killed in combat by and large. Fights also, by 4e, became the major source of variance in your character. Most of your powers in 4e are attacks. You'll use the same Diplomacy skill over and over again, but you will never swing your sword the same way twice in a row. Which is more interesting, detailed, and multifaceted? Which offers more room for player exploration?D&D could easily have lighter consequences (death flags are great for more narrative-style games; 5e imports 4e's death saves which makes permadeath fairly rare in practice) and less combat variation (OD&D weapons all do the same damage and are weilded the same way; 5e attacks don't come in 6 different level-1 flavors), and D&D has, of course, flirted with these ideas, and supported different styles of play to different degrees over its lifespan.But for the OP's purposes, 4e is an example of of how importance creates rules, because the importance of combat created a lot of combat rules. If you're looking for something to be important, it will "want" to have rules attached to it. The only way you can get away with not having rules for important things is basically to force the players to trust the DM implicitly, and outside of mind control or certain particularly close groups, that ain't happenin'.</blockquote>

Verification