Indeed, D&D would be an odd RPG choice (considering what's out there) if one didn't like combat.
Sure, and I think the thread has lost track of something important, over time. Saying "No, DnD is not primarily about combat", does not mean that combat isn't important or prominent in DnD. It just means that it isn't overwhelmingly predominant.
I don't disagree. The problem I had with it was that as written it was too inflexible. Too often our challenges devolved into "Okay Mike did X, Carol did Y, who has the best score in Z?" It replaced role playing with roll playing in too many cases. It often didn't matter what you said, did or had done before the skill challenge started, it all came down to the roll of a dice. Why bother with having a conversation with the merchant when you know all that will matter is that someone has to succeed on 6 checks (i.e. bluff, diplomacy, insight and so on) before 3 failures? A description of skill challenges for those not familiar can be found
here.
I think the core concept
potentially had merit in some cases. I still use a similar structure for some physical/exploration challenges as a change of pace occasionally. I think that's a separate thread topic though.
Like several other ideas, skill challenges are an idea that work better in 5e than in the edition in which it was introduced. applying 5e design logic, using the more loosely defined skills, using advantage and disadvantage, etc. And the game uses the structure in downtime activities. The easiest example is the Crime downtime activity in Xanathar's. 3 checks, with 3 skills, which can be changed with a different approach because that is just how 5e works, and scaling results depending on number of successes.
It's an exceptionally good model for dealing with traps, magical/mechanical devices, improvised rituals, social encounters, and all sorts of other stuff.
Using this idea, it's much easier for every character to have ways to contribute to every major challenge, because why not let the Barbarian use Athletics in a social challenge by distracting all the court dandies with her impressive physical prowess, or let the Rogue use Acrobatics to get people excited in a dance and get people talking?
Well XP for leveling died for me a couple of editions ago, so I wouldn't mind it. For a long time there has been general advice along the lines of giving people XP for overcoming an obstacle without resorting to combat and that non-combat encounters can reward XP. Since my games haven't been particularly combat heavy for a long time, I found myself just handing out XP for non-combat based on how quickly we wanted to level. Once I realized that I just started ignoring XP altogether.
Yeah only time I tracked xp was in 4e, because the system made a lot of sense and worked very logically and intuitively. A given level of thing gave X experience, with special modifiers increasing that amount, so a level 3 standard challenge or monster cost X, and making it Elite or more complex or whatever increased that amount by an amount fairly commensurate with the increase in challenge.
"Keep on the Shadowfell" was a godawful slog because it was an adventure built around attrition fights, in an edition which did not support that in the slightest. People hated KotS, with good reason... but was it because of the edition's choice to not support attrition fights, or the adventure's choice to use them anyway?
Which is too bad, because the story of the adventure is pretty good.
I'd love it if D&D came up with some compromise between their traditional XP system and milestone XP. Something that actually can be considered a system, but which is actually easily managed at the table, and on a character sheet. It should be as easy as tracking arrows or any other resource.
I think part of the key would be to just reduce the numbers down to a point where a small challenge at low level can be worth 1 XP, remove the idea of splitting total xp and just award xp per character, and moving away from XP values per creature (or giving everything a level, and working out a simple key for XP per level involved in a challenge, so a level 3 puzzle with 2 level 2 traps and a level 3 guardian statue would be worth, say, 9xp per character, regardless of how they're overcome).
That's because the "role-play is superior to roll-play, which makes me superior for being a real role-player" mind-virus remains alive and well and endemic in the gaming population at large.
There is definitely some of that, but it's also simply that not everyone benefits creatively from gating roleplaying behind mechanics and dice rolls, and for some people as a result, dnd facilitates RP more than games with more detailed social mechanics. Combine thatwith the tropes of the DnD player options that make it easy for casual and new players to slip right into the RP, and yeah, sometimes we go several sessions without any fights.
It seems weird to me to play a campaign of dnd and not have segments or groups of sessions that play very differently from other segments. I'm not going to switch games because my group wants to do something that is basically a heist, and I'm not going to tell them "well dnd is made for xyz, so we should just stick to that", either. The other people in the group feel the same way.
So when the story unfolds in a way that means we really should attend the Althing and convince the people of the North to create a War Council to help us safeguard the seals of the Goetic Reticulum that keeps fiends in their pit that are being broken by cultists, which is going to require pooling resources, training every able-bodied person we can get to fight spellcasters and minor fiends, and set up messaging stations and watchtowers, and various other tasks that we can't reasonably do ourselves, we are going to spend as many sessions as it takes to wheel and deal, feed people, solve little problems for people, convince allies to pledge support to people on the fence, and basically do a 6 session story arc with exactly 1 fight, culminating in a speech from our Folk Hero ranger/druid who is now known as The Voice of The Mountain, and a vote that is resolved based on the various checks we made over those several sessions leading up to the day of the speech and vote.
It would be completely bonkers, to us, to not do the above. Moving the story away from that arc, using a different system for one story arc, etc, just aren't things that are ever going to happen, especially when we
enjoy playing this stuff in DnD.
Actually, it works for that, too, and by design. The unit of milestones then is scenes. Have a tense negotiation with the Imperial ambassador that goes well? Everyone gets 3 XP. Sneak into the Viscounts room at bight and discover evidence of a conspiracy? Everyone gets 2 XP.
DCC is an "OSR" game, but they want to incentize playing out old school genre stories, not just fights.
Oh hey, that is very similar to how xp works in my system, Quest For Chevar! Of course in QfC, XP is spent on traits and skills, and you gain a level when you've spent a number of XP, and gain a few small increases when you level, but the xp awarding paradigm is basically the same.