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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5632124" data-attributes="member: 82106">You're missing the point here. Combat is a single type of activity in  which specific individuals take fairly specific roles and fairly  specific things happen. It can be covered by a system with whatever  varying levels of abstraction you want, but the goals are clear, the  process is well understood, and it is always in many fundamental ways  the same. You have attacks, defense, movement, injury, cover, flanking,  vision, etc. These are all well understood and well known. Now, tell me what the common factors are in a canoe race, surviving a  landslide, disarming a bomb, negotiating a peace treaty, and outsmarting  the god of thieves. I'm not suggesting there are no commonalities, but  the commonalities are FAR more general and of a totally different  character than the commonalities between swinging a sword, swinging a  mace, shooting a bow, or casting a fireball. The former group of things  involve completely different activities. Now, why is the SC system so much more abstract than the combat system?  This is because the commonalities are at a much higher level. Indeed at  the level that my first list of things share elements in common they are  just as much like combat as they are like each other. So a system like  the SC system, to cover all of those things MUST be equally generalized  and abstract. Indeed the SC system CAN cover combat since at the level of the SC system it is like the other situations.So we now come back to my point. Please suggest a system which can cover the dynamics of snow sliding down a mountain at the same abstraction level as combat, AND cover a canoe race at the same level, AND cover the other situations on my list, all at the same level of abstraction as combat. Clearly you cannot. Nobody can. No such system can exist in any practical RPG. If I were making a game about Ski Patrol then it would make sense to create an avalanche module that was reasonably detailed. That game would probably lack a combat system, perhaps allowing for it at the sort of level of abstraction you mock above. It won't be a big issue in that system because it probably won't come up much.If I were to complain to you that your Ski Patrol game had a sucky combat system your answer to me would pretty much amount to something like "well, play a different game" or "you'll have to do more of the work on making that fun yourself, it isn't the focus of this game." Those are perfectly legitimate and sensible responses, and they do not deserve an "Oberoni Fallacy" response nor an "Any Good Scottsman" response. They are just an acknowledgment of reality. I am comparing them. The thing is YES many of those situations in D&D require more work or more finesse as a DM to pull off well. Again, the reason is D&D is a game that features combat and can thus afford to supply a very detailed combat system. The flaw in your reasoning here is in your assumption that there is some kind of category equivalence between "combat" and "everything that isn't combat" where there is some sort of equally deep rules treatment of "everything that isn't combat" when in fact it is itself 1000's of other categories EACH ONE OF WHICH has as much complexity as combat does.OK, but how many of these powers will I need? Combat has say 5 characters in it and each one has minimally around 10 types of actions they can take at any given point in the combat. How many of these will I need for each of my non-combat situations? Practically speaking combat options are what, 70% of your character? I am pretty skeptical that I can make equivalently detailed subsystems for other things, or the 2 page 4e character sheet could be Encyclopedia Brittanica! At a deeper level there is another issue here, which is what are the proper dimensions of abstraction? In my canoe racing system what are the natural elements that I will model? Individual strokes of the paddle? What? It isn't exactly obvious. With combat this issue exists too, but nearly 100 years of war game development and 35 years of RPG development have given us some good answers. We lack equally good answers for other situations. Given that the types of abstractions will be different and often not well known ahead of time for non-combat things it really isn't easy to build detailed systems for them. The SC system actually IS a pretty good answer. It is very abstract of course, but that's the price of generality.Finally I'd like to point out that your example of combat isn't as comical as you think. There is a vast debate going on right now on the 4e community forums about exactly this, with one group of posters absolutely dedicated to the idea that D&D should shed its combat system entirely and replace it with an abstract SC-like 'theatre of the mind' or something, and the other basically saying "yeah, that ain't D&D, never was D&D, never will be D&D if we have anything to say about it." My point being that as much as you mock highly generalized systems and claim they lack drama and tension and whatnot there are plenty of people who disagree.</blockquote>

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