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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5635164" data-attributes="member: 42582">Like I said upthread, I think that fighting monsters is a primary activity in the game - D&D involves combat. But that, on its own, doesn't show what the game is about.The means/end disintction is pretty important here.I mean, writing a typical song involves lots of attention to rhyme and meter. But it doesn't follow that the typical song is about its rhymes and meter. They are a vehicle.But D&D without elves, or demons, or what-have-you may not be D&D to a person, either. But it doesn't follow that D&D is about elves, or demons, or what-have-you.D&D without polyhedral dice mightn't be D&D to a person, either. But D&D is almost certainly not about rolling polyhedral dice.  They're a tool. They're not the subject-matter.And even though I'm a "no"-voter, this is where I come in on the side of the "yes" crowd.I think that the description you offer is somewhat misleading - it's leaves open, for example, possibilities that the game might involve much wooing of princes or princesses, political struggle (of the Minas Tirith or wizardly politics variety) as a major focus of play, and physically arduous (but combat-free) questing. But trying to run those games in D&D is, in my view pushing against the system rather than with it - for example, a good chunk of a character sheet is irrelevant to wooing a princess or trekking to Mount Doom, and I'm not sure that the sorts of skill challenges you might use to resolve that wooing, or the trek, are enough on their own to carry the game (there are other, better systems than D&D if you want to focus primarily on non-combat activities as the site of conflict's expression and resolution).I think your description is importantly incomplete in another respect - it doesn't mention the GM as having a very dominant role in the "let's pretend" aspect of the game - at a minimum, being in charge of scene framing, and in many approaches to the game (eg Adventure Paths) also having the dominant influence over scene resolution and its consequences. This is somewhat, but not entirely orthogonal, to the OP - not entirely, because in an Adventure Path the main contribution that the players make is to decide exactly how their PCs fight the pre-scheduled battles. Whether or not this sort of play is about combat - and maybe it doesn't have to be, if the players are very invested in adding colour to those combat scenes - combat certainly looms pretty large in it.</blockquote>

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