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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7594460" data-attributes="member: 4937">Oh, I do.  I certainly find your comments vastly more useful than the majority of comments I get when someone disagrees with my ideas.   If I could award you 10 XP to the comment rather than 1, I would.You are correctly assuming that I wanted a rigorous answer, but you are going in the wrong direction regarding the sort of rigor I was claiming.   I wasn't merely stating that because combat had unique qualities related to a cooperative activity that existing RPGs uniquely treated the concept of combat, but that all possible RPGs uniquely treated the concept of combat (or else presumably would fail in their narrative goals).  I did realize that since I had not actually enumerated every possible cooperative activity in my head, but rather only the sort of activities that RPGs normally treat, that activities might exist which RPGs do not normally treat that might have parallel structure to combat, but at the time I couldn't think what they might be.   So, I put a caveat in my otherwise universal claim that, should such non-combat cooperative activities exist, in order to support them a hypothetical RPG would need to develop rules for that activity which supported the simulation and resolution of that activity which were as complex as those developed to support combat.Your insights where therefore very useful, as I can now examine whether my assumptions regarding those hypothetical RPGs were correct.   In essence, you are allowing me to imagine RPGs that don't yet exist because no one (so far as I know) has ever thought to create them - RPGs revolving around sports as conflict or being members of a disease control emergency response team.We don't see Aragorn getting the shakes after he fights Nazgul, but Frodo is pretty explicitly suffering from what we'd now call 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder' as he gets the crap kicked out of him far harder than anyone else in the story.   Likewise, Faramir and Eowyn are explicitly given a time of grief, depression and slow healing after their traumatic experiences.   Tolkien went through WWI - he has a good idea what 'shell shock' is like, and a great deal of empathy for it.Likewise, while we could imagine an RPG that revolves around a games 'Capture the Flag' or a game of Basketball, I agree with you that there are reasons why such an RPG is unlikely to ever be mainstream.   Sports may be the nearest thing to war, but they aren't war.The remainder of your post I'm going to have to save to a latter point, since I only had 5 minutes to spare to respond.   However, I agree with you in the value of lengthy conflicts.  The question becomes, how do we achieve that?</blockquote>

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