(Your quote points to the wrong post, so I almost missed this)
Not exactly. At least, not within one combat.
No, never claimed it was within one combat? The delve would be the natural tactical scope to analyse TSR area D&D in this context.
Combat before 4e was a very fast thing. 3e had its infamous rocket tag, but even 2e and 1e had fragile characters and big, swingy effects (often spells) that could make or break a fight in a single round. And healing happened between fights, not during them. There wouldn't be a kind of ebb and flow to a fight - it's over ASAP.
Interesting. I have never thought of 3ed combat as particularly fast. When you mention it it is true I am pained at how many potentially great set piece battles turned out to be a 2 round anticlimactic dud, but the sheer overhead of those 2 rounds were huge. Setting up battlemap and handling a roster of PC-level complexity monsters is some thing very different than just tracking the hp of a bounch of single attack monsters. Also there was rarely just one action per round. So it was sort of the worst of both worlds. A combat didn't feel quick, and the time spent was too much of a trivial experience to justify the time spent.
We see in 5e a move back toward faster combats (though not nearly as binary as 3e and before could be, which is overall probably a good thing).
5ed is infamous for their bag of hit point slog? Again we are looking at combat that is even longer than 3ed, and still hasn't enough tactical depth to justify the time expendature.
Because combat is only one part of the game. And it can be a relatively small part if the focus was on, say, dungeon exploration, or storytelling.
Yes, and to understand where I am coming from in the next portion: For any edition other than 4ed I detest the combat part of the game. I am no stranger to dungeon exploration and storytelling in D&D.
Like a lot of 4e's more controversial decisions, moving to a role-focused class design meant moving something that could be true for some subset of players and making it a major concern for every player.
I don't buy this. How is this a "major concern"? Indeed why would I care at all if I was in for purely storytelling? It is useful info for those interested in building characters for combat, but that is really the only group I can understand would care at all. So maybe if you can explain to me how them exposing this design philosophy rather than keeping it hidden (as they did in all other editions) in any way affected my story telling abilities, I might understand more where you are coming from.
D&D has often struggled with this tension of defining what its goals of play are. Tell a story? Raid a dungeon? Fight some monsters? Different tables had different weights, and they could all be playing the same game (and, of course, complaining about different elements of it).
If the main goal of play isn't "fight some monsters," (and it wasn't, for thousands of players) then combat roles are not a useful addition, because combat is not really supposed to be a focus in those games.
Agreed, it is not useful. But as it is just informational material, so I do not understand how it hurts. Most 3ed fighter bonus feats are not particularly useful to a story driven campaign, and these are actually complicating the gameplay. How are these not significantly worse?
The AEDU power structure also is an iteration of this same design choice of emphasizing combat.
Yes, and as I mentioned I consider this one radical. But in this context it actually isn't true! You are talking about play not focusing on combat, and there you actually have the ritual system trying to replicate the out of combat versatility of the magic using classes. Indeed I thought this system was more flavorful and strengthened the ability for cool out of combat magic play as the resources involved did not compete with combat resources.
For some tables, fighting some monsters IS the goal of play, and those tables were probably very happy with roles and consistent power structures. Issue being that even if the largest percentage of players have a goal of fighting some monsters (say, 40%), you might still have a huge number players whose goal is NOT that, and who will chafe at design decisions that emphasize that.
Why? How many chafed at the addition of weapon specialisation in AD&D? Adding it is clearly only usefull while fighting, so it clearly shows the design emphasizes combat. The issue might be if there was shown to be things that was valued highly by non-combat players that was clearly deemphsized as a trade-off. I fail to see how a pure design improvement in one area of the game should implicitely reduce it's aproperiatenes for other styles.
Changing from THAC0 to combat bonus seem to widely be regarded as a design improvement in making the combat math easier to understand. How did this design improvement hurt those prefering non-combat modes of play?
One of the things that 4e's bold choices highlighted was that the diversity of people with a vested interested in "playing D&D" is so large that it can be very difficult to build this particular game in a very focused way, because your focus is inevitably going to exclude big swaths of the player base.
I don't think excluded is the right word. They managed to alienate big swaths of the player base, but I think that had more to do with messaging than actual game design. The main demographic I can see they excluded would be the more gritty players by their removal of low level play. But that demographic doesnt seem essential as pathfinder essentialy did the same...
Edit: might be worth pointing out that 5e's perspective on roles is much more resilient to different play styles. The roles are definitely there and different classes are better at different things, but it's not like you can't build a damage-focused Fighter or a healing Warlock or whatever. The roles aren't definitive, they're implied and suggested. I'm sure for the more combat-focused groups out there, this is a worse choice, but it's probably a better choice for D&D, since D&D needs to serve many masters.
And how does this differ from 4ed? They actually provided suggested alternative role for each class. Please tell me how to make an effective fighter healer without multiclassing?
I want to round off with the following observation: My homebrew D&D games (3ed and 5ed) has tended to have several sessions between each combat. I think 4ed might be a superior game for this style of play. The out of combat rules are mostly the same, but the combat rules are actually providing some extended period of fun! If combat is only an occosional event, making that event shine make full sense.
Indeed with this perspective I would say that the style of play 4ed is not working well for is the one basing itself on
lots of combats. Ironically situations that is requiering lots of combat like exploration of a modestly sized dungeon with a reasonable enemy density is exactly the kind of play this "combat focused" design do not work well with. Each combat takes way too much time, the breather periods become too short, and the overall progress if the dungeon exploration slows to something less than a crawl. And at the time 4ed came out this was not a fringe demographics in the D&D space.
