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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bramadan" data-source="post: 4182230" data-attributes="member: 1064">I would argue that the confusion here stems from the rules specialization in DnD which is (and always has been) very difficult for some people to accept.DnD is not a system for simulating all the interactions in a (pseudo-fantasy) world. It is not even a system for simulating all the possible *interesting* interactions in such a world. It is, and always has been since the first Gary Gygax booklet, game of fantasy combat within the context of a role-playing narrative. A hint that this may be so is the page-count of abilities and rules devoted to combat in every edition of DnD thus-far compared with page-count dedicated to any other interaction.Over time designers of DnD have introduced certain amount of secondary rules to the game (utility spells, proficiencies, skills etc...) to enhance the narrative aspect of the game but have quite consciously retained original philosophy of DnD as a combat-game and of characters defined by their combat abilities. It is therefore utterly pointless demanding that a social (non-combat) situation gets nearly as much attention within DnD rules as a combat one.The social conflict (Sucubbus against the Bard-y type PC for the attention of the King) is very far from the original "core competency" of the DnD game and will thus *by design* be much more open to the DM adjudication then the physical conflict would be. A great virtue of DnD4 is that it explicitly recognizes this fact and is striving to make all characters combat-balanced meaning that none of them lose out on what is squarely heart of the game, but it does not mean that the previous edition put any more actual emphasis on the non-combat interactions. I have worked myself on a game where social conflict resolution is given as much emphasis as the combat and I can tell you - it is a *very* different beast from DnD, from the way PCs are constructed down to the sort of narratives that play out. For good or bad, if you play DnD you better accept that non-combat interaction will always be reasonably ad-hock affair.</blockquote>

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