Is D&D "about" combat?

[Neonchameleon]

The mantra I remember, back in my day (when we had to climb uphill both ways in the snow just to roll some d20s, don't you know), was "good role-playing." This is a phrase sprinkled liberally throughout the 2nd edition books in particular. Preachy? You bet. Bad for the game? Not necessarily. As near as I can tell, "good role-playing" according to the 2e definition meant "resisting the temptation to play the numbers," e.g. forsaking min/maxing, monty-hauling, munchkining, etc. in favor of a more immersive experience. It didn't always turn out that way, of course, but at least the admonition was there in the books. The notion was current in gamer culture in the late 80s and throughout the 90s.

And that's changed. I don't think that we see exhortations in favor of "good role-playing" in rulebooks anymore. And I think that gaming has suffered for it. Certainly, in my locality, it's exceedingly difficult to find any player who would rather play a character than a character-sheet. Can it be that attitudes have changed so much in the span of a mere decade? I hope not.

*grumble grodnardy grumble*

Oh, it's changed all right. What's changed is that the ruleset has got a lot better, as has the guidance.

Taking one example, 2e had a lot of editorial columns about not running Monty Haul games. Because it needed to. 3e, instead of ranting about these nebulous Monty Haul games took the smart move of actually providing the DMs with decent wealth by level guidance so they'd actually know if they were running a Monty Haul game. Much simpler, more effective, and much less ink wasted because better design and baked in guidance means that the game itself no longer provides the trap that people were ranting against. 4e goes one step beyond with the treasure parcel concept to show new DMs how big and how frequent doses the treasure should be handed out in. It's baked into the rules so DMs can choose to ignore it if they like, but the concept of ranting about Monty Haul games with respect to 4e is akin to ranting about the overuse of buggy whips on modern cars.

Likewise munchkinism. In 2e if you razor optimised you would outshine people at what they were supposed to be good at. Which was no fun for them. In 4e, if you min-max you'll be the best you are at what you do but with rare exceptions you won't overshadow anyone else. So it isn't anything like as much of a problem and where it is, instead of wasting ink WoTC produces errata. (There's stil the classic fighter outdamaging some strikers, but that's about the only one that springs to mind). Min/Maxing what's on your character sheet has little to do with how immersive the experience is - if anything done well in 4e it enhances it by making your character a better representation of what you have visualised. And the classic exhortation was like an exhortation to eat red meat in favour of reading books - two things that are largely unrelated but both from the right angle can be seen as issues.

 

[Hussar]

Are you saying D&D can't handle a horse race? Because it can. It's a refereed game which means it can handle anything that the referee can handle. I think a reasonable way to handle it would be to have all of the riders make Ride checks. I'd take the difference between the check and the DC necessary to spur the mount to higher speed (15) and keep a running tally for each racer. First one over 100 or so would win. If more than one makes it over 100 in the same number of checks, highest total wins.

How do they compare? What do you mean by that? I think both could easily be quite exciting.

So, using a single skill repeatedly, until you hit the magic number is comparable to the plethora of options available to a character in combat?

That's one point of view I suppose.

 

[Hussar]

Pem - I can see your point, but, I think you're glossing over what the game rewards/punishes.

Step away from D&D for a second and look at something like Paranoia. Now, if you asked someone if Paranoia was about combat, likely they'd say no. It's about taking the common conceits of roleplaying games, turning them on their heads and having a fun, if somewhat cutthroat, time. Your character's basic defining characteristics come from his secret society and his mutant power, not from what he can do in a fight. The game does nothing to reward you for killing something. No advancement or anything like that.

The game is not about combat.

Or, step to the left with Call of Cthulu. Charging in guns blazing gets you dead very, very quickly. There are all sorts of steps you should be doing long before you hit a combat - researching, hitting up the old libraries, investigating witnesses, etc. And, again, you don't get any actual game reward for killing something, and likely you're going to get penalized with a SAN smack for the attempt.

I don't think anyone would say that CoC is about combat.

As to the point that your character could die in combat, that's true. That's why it's a game. If there was no element of risk, then any reward would be pointless. I would point out that you can easily get killed in non-combat encounters as well - traps can kill. Yet, until 3e, you actually weren't rewarded in any mechanical way for finding or removing a trap. And in 3e, you still get the xp whether you remove the trap or set it off, so long as you survive.

In a game that directly rewards combat by making your character better, stronger, more capable, more options (which 4e does), etc, I'm really not sure how you can say that D&D is not about combat.

 

[pemerton]

My knee jerk response was "No, because I don;t want to get crap for loving combat." I will explore this in the later parts of this post. My second thought was "kinda, yeah. D&D is about stories. Stories are about conflict. Conflict in D&D is primarily resolved via combat. SO kinda, yeah."


In what may be my most confrontational statement on ENworld, I want that view to die.

<snip>

I'd gladly take up a pair of scissors and a bonfire if I could cut out and burn every notion in the roleplaying community that knowing, understanding, and using the mechanics of the game does not automatically make a person a bad roleplayer.

Great post, can't XP you, agree entirely about the attitude towards mechanics. If the game breaks down when players use the mechanics it's a bad game. (Obviously there can be corner cases, optional subsystems or the like that have unexpected implications, and the like. But basic PC building isn't one of these.)

Is war about combat?

<snip>

So war is to combat much as D&D is to combat. And yet it seems strange to me to say that war isn't about combat. It's the most important, most distinctive, most decisive element. It's the crux of the matter.

I don't think war is to combat as D&D is to combat. War isn't an expressive/narrative activity, like roleplaying. So war, it seems to me, isn't "about" anything in the way that D&D is.

 

[wedgeski]

So, using a single skill repeatedly, until you hit the magic number is comparable to the plethora of options available to a character in combat?

That's one point of view I suppose.

I'm not exactly sure whose point of view I'm supporting here, but is it really necessary to spell out a dynamic and challenge-based horse race to prove that it can be as fun as combat? (Note, not *as* complex; it is not a game of horse-racing; it is a game fighting monsters and taking their stuff.)

 

[pemerton]

I think you're glossing over what the game rewards/punishes.

Step away from D&D for a second and look at something like Paranoia.

<snip>

The game is not about combat.

Or, step to the left with Call of Cthulu.

<snip>

I don't think anyone would say that CoC is about combat.

Agreed that these games are not about combat, and don't use combat as a primary medium for expressing/resolving combat.

In a game that directly rewards combat by making your character better, stronger, more capable, more options (which 4e does), etc, I'm really not sure how you can say that D&D is not about combat.

I don't agree that 4e does these things - except for the more options part, although that is mostly an artefact of Heroic Tier.

A common criticism of 4e is that the DC etc scaling creates a meaningless treadmill of levelling. I agree with this criticism to an extent - I don't think levelling is a reward - but I don't think it makes the game meaningless, because the point of the game - as I see it - isn't to improve your PC by levelling, but to develop the story of your PC - and levelling is part of that. A demon of the right level should be about as challenging to an epic PC as a kobold is to a 1st level PC, but the differenc between them is not meaningless from the point of view of the story. I think the criticism results from approaching 4e levelling mechanics with Gygaxian sensibilities.

The foregoing is part of my case - it's my case that the game doesn' reward combat. The other part of my case turns on aboutness. The game isn't - or, at least, needn't - be about the medium of conflict expression and resolution.

Analogies are tricky, and I've tried to distinguish Doug's war analogy, but here's one: A crucial technique in Hitchcock's Rope is that the film, apart from a cut early in the movie (from memory, the camera "passes" through a window), is one long take (well, technically there are cuts, because the roll of film runs out after 10 minutes or so, but the cuts fade out and back in on the same object). One key technique in Citizen Kane is the filming of the ice statue scene, and preventing the audience from being aware that the lights are melting the statues. But Rope is not about making a film in one long take. And Citizen Kane is not about technical virtuosity in film making.

Now in a room of film buffs, there is a danger that, for that particular audience, the technical virtuosity overtakes the "real" aboutness of the film. And there is always the danger that an ambitious director might make a movie where the technical virtuosity completely swamps the shallowness of the film as an artwork (arguably, Tarantino can come close to this).

In D&D, there is always this scope for the minutiae of its combat rules to overtake the game, such that the game does become about combat. But the game doesn't have to be that way, even if combat figures very prominently in it. And I think that particular techniques in scenario design, scene framing, integration of PCs into setting, etc, are all part of this.

As you said, D&D isn't about the niggly details, even though they loom large in D&D play. They're a means to an end. I see combat the same way.

Anyway, I hope this (plus my post agreeing with Pentius) makes it clear that I'm not taking the view that the game is not about combat because it's about activities other than combat. Which is a simulationist criterion of "aboutness". I take the view that the game is not primarily about the activities the PC's undertake. It's about the thematic/narrative significance of those activities. At least, as I play it.

 

[Gryph]

I wouldn't disagree with you that combat is a subset of the game. But, again, it makes up the most critical, the most widely-used, and the most consistently "meaty" subset of the game, and that makes D&D primarily about combat (but totally about some other stuff too, to a lesser extent).



And this is why I suggested above that using an individual's own experiences to discuss this topic is a much worse way of going about it than discussing where the designers were coming from.

Because, see I've done just as you have, and had sessions with no combat. And, just like you, I've had sessions that were completely focused on combat. And, here's the kicker: I was more satisfied with my D&D experience in the all-combat sessions than I was with the no-combat sessions.

It's all butting heads until you start looking at how the game was actually put together instead of what a given person is doing in their own home.

It's not really a game until people start playing it. Until then it's just a pretty book of suitable size to put on a coffee table. Being dismissive of people's experience playing the game is insulting and intellectually dishonest.

 

[billd91]

So, using a single skill repeatedly, until you hit the magic number is comparable to the plethora of options available to a character in combat?

That's one point of view I suppose.

It may be if you want to engage in a horse race rather than attack your fellow jockeys. What is your point?

 

[Bullgrit]

If you like D&D and a lot of combat, then D&D is about combat. If you like D&D but not a lot of combat, then D&D is not about combat.

Personally, I like D&D and I like a lot of combat. D&D is about combat. This is a good thing.

Bullgrit

 

[billd91]

I don't have the same preferences as Kubasik in roleplaying - unlike him, I enjoy mainstream fantasy RPGing in which mechanically heavy combat is central to conflict resolution - but I think his diagnosis of "We have combat rules because we need them" is dead on. If you don't want combat to be a big part of your play, then you don't need combat rules. (It can be a big part of play without being what play is about. Breathing is a big part of my life, but it's not what my life is about.)

And I generally agree. There are games that specifically de-emphasize combat in favor of other things. But D&D (and Traveller and Cyberpunk 2020 and Champions, etc) all want combat to be reasonably interesting and so they do require fairly heavy sets of combat rules to maintain levels of fairness and player control. But I assert that's a far cry from going out and saying "D&D (or Traveller or Cyberpunk 2020 or GURPS etc) is about combat." These games may do combat reasonably well and that may be a selling point for players interested in that aspect. But they do much more than combat as well.
Chainmail was about combat. But D&D has a conceit beyond that.

I think you've just shown that D&D doesn't have the same robustness of mechancis to adjudicate a horse race as it does to adjudicate combat. The comparison to a game like HeroWars/Quest is pretty stark, for example. (One problem is that D&D's movement mechanics start from the assumption that movement is a subsidiary consideration in a broader context - namely, combat - whereas in a race movement is the primary consideration.)

You don't need the same degree of robustness in all of the game's subsystems to have a functional RPG, considering characters go off-rules often. Rather, I think it needs a fairly robust way of describing the character and giving a general resolution principle to determine if the character succeeds at what he's trying to do.