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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5634352" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed that these games are not about combat, and don't use combat as a primary medium for expressing/resolving 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.</blockquote>

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