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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Furious_Puffin" data-source="post: 6861603" data-attributes="member: 11831">Yeah, I'm counting the spell description of 'fireball' as combat page count, most of the magic rules (that explain how blasts work), the feat 'crossbow expertise' or 'sentinel' most of the class description, most of the equipment section etc. For example, if we consult the 5E SRD document and look at the barbarian class description, which takes two and a half pages. Of that, three lines are related to non combat skills and abilities. If I whip out an apocalypse world character, about 1 page is the actual class mechanics and of that maybe half covers non combat rules (depends on the character to a yooge extent).  I honestly think it's weird when people say that 5E doesn't have a strong focus on combat. 5E has less combat focus than 4E (because it's stripped out spell selection from the Barbarian/Fighter axis),  but that's still a lot of combat focus.  Virtually no mechanics are devoted to non combat activities. Bottom line is I agree with Vargas about the 5E treatment of skills/non combat activities. Not that 4E or 3.5E have a better solution imho, this is a huge issue across the D&D brand, and is why I question anyone picking up D&D and saying let's have a non combat focused game. Compare with GUMSHOE which spends absolutely ages on its out of combat mechanics (and has some questionable mechanics for combat, particularly if you try for cinematic combat). Similarly for Apocalypse world. I've got the GUMSHOE SRD handy so let's compare the skills sections to each other. The GUMSHOE system is of comparable mechanical complexity to 5E (imho) and weights in at 65 pages. The 5E srd excluding monster descriptions comes in at 263(!) or over 4 times as much.By my rough count, the gumshoe SRD spends almost 10 times the page count dewelling on how non combat skills work. Given the much lower page count, that shows the relative levels of focus and what I consider a non combat focused game. The real focus of those first editions that has been moved away from IMHO are exploration and resource management. 5E has tried to renew focus on resource management, but it does it via the very long adventuring days that are heavily focused on combat. 6-8 encounters is a lot of combat (1,440 rounds over the life of a character by my estimate. I'm assuming roughly 25% of encounters will be non combat for those numbers, but that we skew towards the high side of encounters per day).</blockquote>

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