Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hairfoot" data-source="post: 4318216" data-attributes="member: 23732">Thanks!I wouldn't play an RPG without a combat system.  I love the fights, and without them there's no way I would have become hooked on D&D as a 10-year-old.  I'm also an ex-wargamer, so I was chuffed that 3E supported a miniature-based combat system.  Yes, D&D has always been combat heavy, and combat rules and options have always taken up the most space in books.However, combat and roleplaying aren't siloed.  I think that the rules and options (and their presentation) are an important catalyst for creativity.  Take spellcasters.  Without wishing to walk on the thin ice of edition wars, in previous editions the utility spells took their place alongside the combat spells.  As a new player, or when reading a new edition, it seemed equally possible to make a wizard who knows some combat spells for self-defence but otherwise has a spellbook full of floating disks, telekinetics, mind-reading, and navigational and divination spells, as it was to cast a PC who hurls bolts of lighting and blobs of acid.The description of 4E wizards makes them out to be magic guns, focussed solely on annihilating opponents in combat.  There are rituals, of course, and a flexible, imaginative player will be able to build whatever they picture in their mind's eye.  But the rules seem to say "you are a wizard.  You blast things and use powers which give you an advantage in a fight.  Any other application of your powers is an exception which requires a special ceremony, because that's generally not your focus." I think that's bound to create a trained-for-battle, war-wizard approach to character development, with other characterisations seen as suboptimal by default.While the menu of combat powers is great for building a fighting class, I think it shoehorns all other classes into a combat paradigm.  Over time I think that will repress roleplaying that isn't related to combat (for new players especially).Here's an analogy: if you go to a restaurant and notice that the menu has 30 varieties of burger and 2 pasta dishes, you're going to view that place as a burger restaurant.  You're not likely to try the pasta because the preponderance of burgers indicates that the owners don't have much interest in cooking pasta, and you'll suspect that it will be of poorer quality than the burgers.  And if you do order it, you'll wonder if you're missing out on what the place does best.Eventually, the owners will finally be able to take pasta off the menu and concentrate on what they do best, because the minority of people who like it don't go there any more.</blockquote>

Verification