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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5030741" data-attributes="member: 18280">Thank you for the well-reasoned post, Canis.  XP to you.Design goals, regardless of the edition, are not monolithic.  Certainly, the designers of 4e knew that players were not always going to be in combat.  Since 4e prefers the AP approach (a trend started waaaaayyyyy back with DragonLance and greatly strengthened in 3e due to the success of the Dungeon APs), there needs to exist some means to move characters from scene to scene.However, the designers were clear that D&D isn't a game about talking to faeries; it is a game about combat.  And it shows.I credit 3e with having the first system in place (complex skill checks) to deal with non-combat encounter conflicts in a satisfying mechanical way.  3e provided DMs with excellent tools to make a game that is precisely about talking to faeries, and to make that "action" meaningful in game terms.However, the skill challenge system in 4e, as it first appeared, needed a lot of work.  It was simply bland and meaningless, with the die rolls having no real effect apart from toting up a score.  As the means to move the story along to the next exciting combat sequence, it was a reasonable tool.  As a means to exciting resolution in and of itself, not so much.In fact, I would go so far as to say that skill challenges in 4e, as initially presented, were a pale shadow of more robust mechanics from 3e.  Again, when examining the initial release of 4e, what are characters designed to do?  What are their class abilities geared for?  I can example class abilities in 1e that are not geared for combat without any difficulty whatsoever....even low-level ones.Again, we are presented with traditionally non-combat parts of D&D (traps, for instance) that we are asked to treat as though they were combat.  What are we to make of this?In the case of monsters, non-combat utility powers from previous editions are stripped out.  What are we to make of this?In actual play, any given combat will grind away a disproportionate amount of table time to any other encounter type, by design.  Contrast this to 1e, where a disproportionate amount of table time is given to exploration and mapping, again by design.  So much of 1e's table time is devoted to exploration and mapping, in fact, that elements in the game (wandering monsters, frex) were included to impose some form of limit to the activity.  Indeed, the single most common complaint heard on EN World about 1e is the "boredom" imposed by "Greyhawking" a dungeon.Again, the result of different design goals.  And the result of some people trying to fit their round pegs into 1e's square holes.One would think they would be happy that the games have different design goals.RC</blockquote>

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