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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6027177" data-attributes="member: 42582">I just wanted to pick up on this one comment in an excellent post that I sadly can't XP.The game gives us rules to adjudicate ravines - jumping rules, climbing rules, falling damage rules, rope use rules, etc. They may not be the best such rules that can be created, but they are there.Where are the rules for storms, and adjudicating a storm as an obstacle? No version of D&D has them that I'm aware of (the Wilderness Survival Guide has half-baked rules for being struck by lightning while on the ground; a number of Dragon somewhere in the low-ish 100s had an article about clouds as an obstacle to flight; 4e has rules for winds causing forced movement at the start of a turn).This tells me something about the game: namely, that it is not intended to support flight as a source of challenges or complications. Rather, flight is meant to be a solution to those challenges.This makes it hard to compare flight to a +1 armour: the latter is about contributing to action resolution, whereas the former is ultimately about circumventing it.If you want to play a non-combat game, why would you start with D&D? Especially those editions of D&D which have no mechanics for resolving social conflicts?Of the fantasy RPGs I know, I'd choose Burning Wheel for such a game, but I'm sure there are others that could do the job too. But D&D isn't one of them.I think the second quoted sentence helps explain the first. I mean, in the real world many people don't resort to violence even when the stakes are very high (like losing one's job, say, or being evicted from one's house). It is possible to set up situations in an RPG that similarly, in virtue of both their mechanical and their fictional framing, make non-violent approaches desirable and violent ones effectively non-viable.But typically we don't do that, because that's not what the genre is about!</blockquote>

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