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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8315514" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I wasn't comparing D&D to a specific game. What I was saying is that if you remove combat from the game, what's left isn't really enough to be very good at anything. You seem to be describing a flexible system as one that can accommodate being changed to suit....and I can understand that. But is that the only way a game could be flexible? What if a game had mechanics that made court intrigue play in as engaging and compelling a way as combat? What if a game was able to take the removal of combat in stride because what remained was still robust enough to handle the desired play experience?D&D's core mechanic of "roll a d20, add modifiers, beat a target number" may be suitable for many things. But once you move beyond that core mechanic, there is very little D&D offers for anything other than combat. That to me, does not seem all that flexible. It seems pretty clear that D&D is designed primarily for combat.Yes, of course. Different people have different tastes and preferences. I don't think anyone is really claiming that any one game is more flexible than another besides you. Most of the rest of us seem to be arguing that other games are at least no less flexible than D&D.Well you're combining different thoughts from different posters. But I don't think the above need to be mutually exclusive. I don't think it would be extremely controversial to say "D&D is very focused on combat, and its social interaction rules are so loose that they aren't engaging at all." I'm not saying that social rules need established DCs for everything, or that any possible action needs to be defined and codified. I'm saying having some rules in place can help players know what's possible and what they can try. Or to have general actions or categories of actions that can accommodate many kinds of actions....like Moves in Apocalypse World.....can really promote creative play. Outcomes that are known, targets/DCs that are known.....all those kind of player facing elements serve to inform players of what kinds of things they can accomplish. Yeah, that's why I specifically said "scene and genre appropriate"; that's a given. However, if I'm playing a character in a charged social situation....like, things could go bad if I don't handle it right......D&D does very little to help the player out. It unloads everything onto the GM. They decide if a course of action is possible. They determine the information available in the scene to inform the player of the situation, and the likelihood of their action succeeding or not. They set the DC. They determine the consequence of failure. They determine what's achieved on success. They decide if any of these things are shared in any way with the player before the roll is made.Apply that same approach to combat. Imagine if instead of following the processes of combat in D&D....honoring initiative and allowing PCs the proper number of actions and allowing attacks against static ACs and rolling damage on a hit, or no damage on a miss.....the GM just kind of decided all that in the moment. No one would advocate for this combat system. Now, that's fine. I play D&D 5E quite a bit. My group and I all have a good time because the game is primarily about fighting things. And we can get the game to kind of do what we'd like by changing up some rules or processes here and there. I don't think that's a mark in the game's favor as far as flexibility goes so much as it is a comment that a group of players who know each other well and are familiar with RPGs and with this game specifically can kind of nudge (or in some cases violently shove) it toward their desired experience.</blockquote>

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