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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7932497" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that the way RPGs have been played traditionally tends to thwart that as a solution. The problem with your suggestion on its face is that the process of finding out the skeletons in the closet by the snooping expert, or the process of threatening minions and dear ones, each themselves plays out as a solo activity. So while it might be possible for each of those lines of play to be interesting, they involve taking long turns while the rest of the party is not interacting. They may come together at a point at some point, and influence future events, but they don't resolve the problem that the activity you describe doesn't generate joint activity in the way combat does.There is a potential resolution, but it carries it's own problems, and that's to do something like 'Blades in the Dark' does of treating time non-linearly and allowing non-simultaneous events to be resolved together through flashback to earlier scenes.  But that non-linearity at least allows you to have the feeling of joint activity, so that as the face does their thing, you can narrate how you helped through retroactive activity.  And I think it's that it's actually very hard to play out other sorts of challenges in a natural way and have the characteristics of play that make group combat so interesting.  Or to put it another way, it's relatively easy to come up with interesting mechanics for platoon scale war games that creates a transcript of play through a natural linear narrative experience in which everyone participates.  It's not at all easy to do so for everything else.</blockquote>

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