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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4069899" data-attributes="member: 710">Honestly, I do think there will be no "social powers" in the game. At least not if they are competing with combat powers. It just doesn't work well. Instead of charisma as "dump stat" you get "dump powers" - nobody is taking those powers unless he has a very special reason to do so.There is still a slight change that it's possible - maybe power learning is "siloed" - one level, you gain combat powers, one level, you gain non-combat powers. In that case it will work.I still trust their promise that there will be a social encounter system, but it will probably not rely on powers. I think it will work well, but it will lack the depth of combat. I hope that a game like a 4E based D20 Modern will focus more efforts in providing in-depth rules for non-combat activities. But in the end, maybe even that won't happen. One of the important goals of 4E is that every character gets to contribute something meaningful - even critical - to combat. You can't really make a character that is useless there. D&D always will have a lot of combats, so the goal is - in my view - worthy. If combat is as tactically complex as it at least since D&D 3rd edition, this just must be done. Combat takes too long to not have every PC (and therefor his player) engaged in it.The problem might be to extend this philosophy to other areas. Social encounters, Research and similar things. It's very hard to make it reasonable for every character to contribute in each of it. And if you don't that, you have a problem of the wandering spot-light - in combat, it wanders turn by turn, and pretty quick. That's nice and works well.But if only one or two characters of five are engaged in a social encounter, the spotlight can never turn to the other 3 during this time. You can try to switch to whatever stuff these 3 guys are doing, but that requires a lot of multi-tasking, since the scenes are so different - try switching from a romantic interlude to characters securing evidence on a murder scene and a character interrogating a suspect. And keeping every detail you wanted to describe the PC in mind. So you usually end up with a slowly wandering spot-light. And sometimes you might have less scenes for a certain type of character, so there is an imbalance of spotlight for a whole session - this can really hurt the enjoyment of the game for those neglected. It remains to be seen if the WotC designers can address the unique challenges of "non-combat"-encounters as well as they can for combat encounters.</blockquote>

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