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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8124335" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I reject the premise of this question. Several false dichotomies are being set up here.Roleplaying is the act of imagining yourself as another person and/or in a hypothetical or fictional scenario and making decisions as you imagine you or that other person would in that scenario. Combat in D&D is a fictional scenario which involves quite a lot of decision-making, and the abilities and traits of the character are major factors in that decision making. Combat is very much roleplaying.Setting aside the frequent misuse of the term roleplaying and assuming what you meant was social interaction, I reject to the notion that this is dichotomous with game mechanics, or that game mechanics and combat are synonymous. It is true that the mechanics of D&D have a heavy emphasis on combat resolution and a much lighter touch with other aspects of play - an artifact of its war gaming roots. However, social interaction does indeed have game mechanics associated with it, and while DMs have the power to ignore those rules, that is not a power I care to exercise. Game mechanics are an important element of social interaction scenes in my games.Finally, I find the dichotomy between leveling up and character development is very strange. Leveling up is simply a thing that happens as part of playing the game, while character development is something that can happen, depending on how the player chooses to portray their characters. Ideally, both things should happen in any game, though I have observed a tendency in players to develop characters in great detail prior to the start of play and very little during the course of play. Regardless, leveling up will happen no matter how much or how little the characters develop narratively throughout the course of play.If I were to abstract the question to the point where it sets up a meaningful dichotomy, it might be something like “do your games tend to feature more combat scenes or more social interaction scenes?” My answer to that question would be that I try to include a significant number of each in every session I run. I think both are very important to creating a satisfying D&D experience. However, I have observed that many DMs tend to run games which focus far more heavily on social interaction than my own do. When I hear DMs brag about sessions where “no one touched a die,” I shake my head and wonder why they think of that as a positive thing. From the way I hear other DMs complain about the 6-encounter adventuring day, I get the sense that my preferences must skew more towards combat than the average DM.Personally, I consider exploration to be the primary emphasis in my games, and combat and social interaction to be two methods of resolving conflicts that occur during the course of that exploration. Both involve a mix of roleplaying and game mechanics.</blockquote>

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