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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5571011" data-attributes="member: 18280">Cool.  I very much doubt that you are alone!Lets disentangle combat and conflict for a minute, shall we?  We should be willing to agree that one can have conflict without combat, yes?  Combat is a subset of the conflicts that can exist.Now, I will agree that if you are disinterested in conflict, you are playing the wrong game.  Indeed, even true cooperative games include some form of conflict, so you should perhaps avoid games altogether.However, if you are going to say that making a character disinterested in combat is "playing the wrong game", I have to take exception.In the original game, gaining treasure was the primary reward, and combats were largely avoided when possible.  Exploration helped one gain treasure, and discover the means to avoid needless combats.  Extra combats -- in the form of wandering monsters -- were used as a cattle prod to keep the characters moving.The encounter as the unit of game play -- expicitly focusing on combat -- was not part of the game until 3e.  At the same time, WotC made the primary reward come from combat, rather than riches that could be gained equally by avoiding combat.  Wandering monsters as a cattle prod existed until the late 3.x era, when WotC blogs began suggesting dumping them.  2e and 3e both have explicit pacifist options for characters....an odd choice if this really is "playing the wrong game"!  The Complete series of 2e books supplies far more world-immersion material than combat material, and the DMing advice in both 1e and 2e reflects a different Moreover, TSR-D&D combat was designed to play fast.  And there is a reason for that.  "The less time you spend in combat -- especially in the same long combat, or engaged in the rules minutia of combat -- the more the game supports role-playing."  D&D, as it was originally envisioned, was an attempt to balance the "role-playing" and the "game" side.  In one editorial, Gary Gygax actually expressed concern that the "role-playing" side was receiving too much weight (if memory serves, that was during the 2e heyday.)2e Combat & Tactics is an exception here....as is Battlesystem.  But Battlesystem is explicitly a wargame, and both suffer the same problems with immersion that (IMHO) WotC-D&D does.That's absolutely cool, and you can be certain that there is a fair amount of combat in games I run, too.BUT, "Does X support role-playing well?" and "Is X fun?" are two distinct questions.RC</blockquote>

Verification