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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5937905" data-attributes="member: 2067">It depends, really. 1 (as long as it's not an Evil Acolyte!) probably isn't. 2 doesn't have to be (a party could pay up, or try to talk them out of it). 3, 9, 11, 13, 15, and 20 are all just dumb animals (not likely to be MUCH of a combat). And 17 almost definitely isn't (fighting sprites is not a great tactic). There's a flexibility here. Combat is something you can do when you hit a random monster, but it's not your only option, or your best option, or even necessarily the option you're the best equipped for. Don't get me wrong, I still believe that early D&amp;D (as I mentioned above) wanted you to fight things more often than not. But there was certainly support for the idea that fighting things wasn't the only valid track to take. Part of what encouraged this, I think, was system simplicity. If it takes the DM 15-20 minutes to design a combat encounter, the paths running into it are going to be more important than the paths that mean those minutes were wasted. If the DM took less than a minute to design the encounter (because he pulled up the statblock and rolled for quantity and called it a day), it's much more disposable.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 5937905, member: 2067"] It depends, really. 1 (as long as it's not an Evil Acolyte!) probably isn't. 2 doesn't have to be (a party could pay up, or try to talk them out of it). 3, 9, 11, 13, 15, and 20 are all just dumb animals (not likely to be MUCH of a combat). And 17 almost definitely isn't (fighting sprites is not a great tactic). There's a flexibility here. Combat is something you can do when you hit a random monster, but it's not your only option, or your best option, or even necessarily the option you're the best equipped for. Don't get me wrong, I still believe that early D&D (as I mentioned above) wanted you to fight things more often than not. But there was certainly support for the idea that fighting things wasn't the only valid track to take. Part of what encouraged this, I think, was system simplicity. If it takes the DM 15-20 minutes to design a combat encounter, the paths running into it are going to be more important than the paths that mean those minutes were wasted. If the DM took less than a minute to design the encounter (because he pulled up the statblock and rolled for quantity and called it a day), it's much more disposable. [/QUOTE]

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