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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5634194" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree with this at all. Consider a game of Traveller, for example, in which combat is extremely rare and interstellar travel and trade are the main focus of play: rules to support starship travel, buying and selling, negotiating, refuelling etc will have a much greater influence on the "fairness" of play. (And I think you kind-of notice this in your later reference to Traveller.)From Christopher Kubasik, <a href="http://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/itoolkit1.html" target="_blank">Interactive Tookit</a>:Flip open your rulebook. Any rulebook. See that big chapter on combat? And the equally large chapters on technology and magic, both of which are used primarily for combat? Stories don't need all that stuff. White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade is a game about the brooding affairs of immortal vampires and their clan disputes. It's moody. It's horror. It's about personality and character. For some bizarro reason, there's space in the rules devoted to distinguishing between the damage done by shotguns and that of Uzis. . . . The narrative of most roleplaying games is tactical simulation fiction. This style of story revolves around weapons and split second decisions made during combat. . . . It's assumed that roleplaying games need these tactics, morale modifiers and tables of weapons. After all, that's the way it's always been. But why? . . . Roleplaying games as we understand them originated 30 years ago - a decade before Dungeons & Dragons saw the light of day - when wargamers in Minneapolis each controlled one soldier instead of whole armies. . . . It's no surprise that Gary Gygax and others carried a lot of wargaming over into Dungeon & Dragons. What is surprising is how much of the wargaming hobby is still with us. . . . Here are some of the habits left over from wargames that many of us don't really need or want. Emphasis on tactics . . . Fake realism . . . Random results . . . The gamemaster as a superior participant to the storytelling session . . .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.)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.)</blockquote>

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