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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7932015" data-attributes="member: 4937">Because none of them involve all participants working together to solve the problem by each making key decisions regularly. Social interaction differs from combat in that if you aren't skilled at it, then you are really in the way and actively harming success if you engage in it. In combat, less skilled members of the party can always adopt support positions in a way that seems reasonable to the fiction. It's not at all clear what that "support position" looks like in the vast majority of social interactions. Add to this the problem that class based systems go out of there way to ensure some degree of competence in the combat sphere, but don't assume that every class needs some degree of social competence (and point buy systems basically never assume that and assume that they are being superior in doing so).Overland journeys are the same thing. Maybe everyone is rolling every day to pass Navigation, Pathfinding, Survival, Portage and Perception tests, and thus contributing to the success of the group. But it's not clear that anyone making these rolls and having these roles is making any decisions. The result is potentially grindy, and the real action usually results from the DM taking one of these failures and turning it into some more conventional scenario as a complication - a combat, a 'trap' (or hazard), that resulted from the failure. Otherwise, it's just book keeping, which gets tiresome after a while. Complicating that further is again, almost no system insists on parity in the travel/exploration sphere. And as a special case, D&D tends to make avoiding overland travel incurred costs very 'cheap' in terms of outlay of resources (via things like 'Create Food & Water' or 'Teleport').Network hacking, again the same thing. Machine repair, crafting, and so forth again the same thing.A lot of people tend to believe that the problem is simply that the system provides for combat but not for other sorts of challenges, but I think that is a myth.   I think that the problem is that realistic simulation of combat produces something with a lot of decision points where it is easy to imagine how everyone is participating and helping because there is a strong correspondence between reality (in battle, numbers are important) and the fictional simulation.   But if you do this with trying to persuade someone, it's not at all clear where the decision points are or how, if there are decisions points, it's not just better to have one player/character making those decisions (the one that is most skilled).</blockquote>

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