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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9614892" data-attributes="member: 2067">There's a bit of fundamental confusion about D&amp;D that is something of a result of its popularity.Is it a game primarily about fighting monsters cinematically? If so, and combat is tedious, it needs some more game-system juice. Things like the escalation die, or big, dramatic things that swing the fight in significant ways, ways to combine character efforts, and generally things that add some wahoo.Is the game primarily about fighting monsters tactically? If so, and combat is tedious, we need to look at how individual decision points can combine effectively or not to create an overwhelming victory. We don't need juice, we need granularity, impactful decision-making, and stacking effects.Is the game primarily about something other than fighting monsters, even if fighting monsters sometimes features in it? If so, and combat is tedious, we need to look at eliminating time spent in combat. Reduce decisions, reduce the juice, treat monster encounters more like traps (a few rolls and it's over), keep them interesting, but even movement + action is probably too much decision-making.The answer is that D&amp;D is all of these things, some of the time, and so the combat system right now tries to ride the line a little bit, and doesn't deliver on any of these to a really strong degree (because it wants to be general, not specific). And different games have different biases depending on the style of game we're playing.My bias tends to be for the third point, because my games are only about fighting monsters some of the time, but I'm well aware that the first two styles are also very popular, and one solution doesn't work for all three.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 9614892, member: 2067"] There's a bit of fundamental confusion about D&D that is something of a result of its popularity. Is it a game primarily about [B]fighting monsters cinematically[/B]? If so, and combat is tedious, it needs some more game-system juice. Things like the escalation die, or big, dramatic things that swing the fight in significant ways, ways to combine character efforts, and generally things that add some wahoo. Is the game primarily about [B]fighting monsters tactically[/B]? If so, and combat is tedious, we need to look at how individual decision points can combine effectively or not to create an overwhelming victory. We don't need juice, we need granularity, impactful decision-making, and stacking effects. Is the game primarily about [B]something other than fighting monsters[/B], even if fighting monsters sometimes features in it? If so, and combat is tedious, we need to look at eliminating time spent in combat. Reduce decisions, reduce the juice, treat monster encounters more like traps (a few rolls and it's over), keep them interesting, but even movement + action is probably too much decision-making. The answer is that D&D is all of these things, some of the time, and so the combat system right now tries to ride the line a little bit, and doesn't deliver on any of these to a really strong degree (because it wants to be general, not specific). And different games have different biases depending on the style of game we're playing. My bias tends to be for the third point, because my games are only about fighting monsters some of the time, but I'm well aware that the first two styles are also very popular, and one solution doesn't work for all three. [/QUOTE]

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