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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 6237432" data-attributes="member: 9053">Combat balance is important because of the "game" aspect of the RPG.The Next edition has talked quite a bit about three pillars of D&D: the social aspect, the exploration aspect and the combat aspect. Each of those pillars is an important part of a D&D game, and so each character should have something to do when each of the pillars is getting its time on stage, as it were.So that's why combat balance is important: combat is designed to be one-third of your game experience playing D&D (although from my experience, in many campaigns it ends up closer to half, or even more) so giving the players something to contribute during that period is important in terms of game design. Notice that I said "something to contribute" which does not necessarily mean damage: a well designed combat has room for several different roles that can all contribute and have fun. That's good game design.Now what follows from that, and gets talked about a whole lot less, is that the other two pillars should get equal time in the spotlight, and good game design means that everyone gets to do something at those times as well. Those two pillars need massive work to shore them up to being on the same level as combat in the game.When I see discussions like this, it seems like people are saying "we spend too much time on combat, so let's make it less detailed and less interesting so that it doesn't overshadow the other two pillars." While that's one way to tackle the issue, I'd say it's precisely the wrong way to go about it: D&D has fun, exciting combat, and the way to balance the game is not to make it any less interesting, but rather to make the other parts of the game more interesting and take them up to the level of importance that combat has.I play a character in Warhammer Fantasy who is about 90% dedicated to social and knowledge actions. He's a noble Indiana Jones as it were. That character gets plenty to do outside of combat, since the game has robust support for that kind of action. When combat starts, I take a much more supporting role, and help the other characters (largely combat monsters) do their job. It works, and it's fun, but that's because the game is designed for a lot of social encounter-ing.There are games where exploration is a huge part of the rules (the One Ring is the one I am playing at the moment), and MANY games where the social aspects to the game are just as important as combat (any game with "social combat"), so there's no reason we can't have those nice things for D&D as well.So (and this is my opinion, of course) the solution isn't to say "let's make combat less interesting," but rather to make the other parts of the game better." Saying, "I want D&D where combat is, well, less fun," is fine to want (of course!) I just don't think that's the best course of action to make a game people will want to play.</blockquote>

Verification