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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1187343" data-attributes="member: 10201">Sure, D&D3E is in some ways less combat-oriented [hopefully that's a more-neutral term?] than previous editions of the game.  That wouldn't invalidate a claim that it's more combat-oriented than lots of other (most?) RPGs out there.Anyway, how combat-oriented is D&D3E?  Well, it spends 25pp on combat rules, and, generously, 5pp on social interaction (and no real rules for that).  The classes are explicitly balanced assuming a combat-heavy campaign model, and can easily be demonstrated to need significant tweaking for, say, a politics-heavy campaign model.  The skills are obviously designed with conflict, mostly physical, as the central point (looking at which skills are broken down and which are lumped together; not to mention the specific uses for the skills).  The spells are also designed with violent conflict in mind.  Look at some of the spells that were dropped or level-changed from AD&D2, and you'll note that a noticable fraction of them were very cool spells with absolutely *no* applicability to adventuring.  Similarly, the underlying logic of what magic can accomplish owes more to the game balance of conflict resolution than to internal logic.  (Extreme example: Brain Lock paralyzes a swimming or flying creature sufficiently that they can not swim or fly, but does not eliminate the Dex bonus to AC--presumably because rendering targets flatfooted would be too powerful for that level of power, which is only true if your most likely course of action is to attack targets.)On challenges: 250pp devoted to monsters, a dozen or two devoted to traps, and, what, 10pp devoted to social/political challenges?Shall i go on?Now, i'm trying to be non-pejorative about this and i'm not intending to say that it's bad.  But to claim that D&D3E isn't combat-focused seems silly.  "Combat-focused" is *not* the same as "combat only"--i'm not saying you can't support other playstyles with D&D3E.  I'm saying that it has a *lot* more support for one playstyle than any other.  This is not the same as saying that those who play it play it in that manner--but i do suspect, from observations of players of many RPGs, that what the game supports most heavily gets played most heavily.  If you see a shade of distinction between "hack-n-slash" and "combat-focused", that's fine--i think they're synonyms, one pejorative, one neutral.</blockquote>

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