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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6237656" data-attributes="member: 17106">Well, that was...oddly polite. Always appreciated.I buy that. I think there's a lot of variance, but I suspect the average group spends more than a third and less than half of their game time on fighting. IIRC that's where the ENW polls on the subject usually land.See this is where I get off. I don't think having a character marginalized is necessarily bad, nor the rules fault. As I stated, I do think the rogue abilities should be useful against undead. However, in general, I think that characters are not perfect and that some situations will naturally apply wherein their usefulness is reduced or completely negated.And I don't agree with that. I get tons of requests from players to play non-combat characters. Conversely, I see characters that are basically combat machines and whose players are perfectly content to participate on a reduced level when the game is not engaging them in whatever expertise they've chosen. I don't think specialization is bad.Certainly, it's a norm both in fantasy fiction and in episodic television (which mirrrors D&D sessions in structure) that some characters will just fade out for a while and become borderline irrelevant, whereas others will get moments in the spotlight. Typically, the spotlight is shared, but it won't be shared with perfect equality, nor is getting to be useful and the center of attention always the goal. There are many great supporting characters, and there's nothing wrong with being one in D&D.Sure. I don't want to waste time either. However, this is how I see gaming. It's like a story, but sometimes you get to change the course of the story. As a DM, I expect that I'm telling a story that people would listen to even if they were not participating at all. However, in D&D, the listener adopts the perspective of a character, and tells me what he thinks the character should do, and that affects the story I end up telling. By their input (and that of the dice), the end product is more dynamic and reflects a more diverse perspective than a simple narration by one author.However, the story, not the participatory element, is what's really making this a worthwhile use of time. The ability to affect the narrative is a cool feature that adds to the experience, not a responsibility of the DM and certainly not of the rules. Sort of like those choose your own adventure books, or like playing in any good cRPG, though in D&D it's much more open-ended what can happen.This has had a significant effect on my games. For example, I used to go by the old dogma of "don't split the party up", but now I split them up all the time. I ran one short CoC campaign wherein the three players were in the same geographical area experiencing the same event, but never met or had any direct influence on each other. I do this on a smaller scale all the time, intercutting between different people's stories. The players that aren't involved are still active listeners and cheerleaders for their fellow PCs.Moreover, any player in my games knows that there will be times when their PCs are rendered useless by enemies or situations that subvert whatever they are designed to do. Moreover, it's pretty much given that at some point they will be stunned, ability damaged, captured, enchanted, or killed. Stuff happens. They know that their character sheets will often be useless, and their decisions often meaningless. They also know that sometimes their abilities will be useful and their decisions will have meaning. To (loosely) quote Vince Lombardi: "This game is going to be decided by two or three plays, but I can't tell you which ones, so you're going to have to play hard on all of them". To a good player, feeling less powerful than other characters or feeling useless in general isn't a disincentive to keep playing, it's a source of motivation.If I were that rogue, I'd be doing one of two things. One, looking for alternative ways to contribute. Two, looking for alternative quests. From an in-character perspective, I do agree: if my character sucks at zombie hunting, why am I doing that for a living, assuming I have any choice in the matter?So do I.To me, though, D&D isn't competing against shooters or cRPGs or games in general. It's competing against watching movies, reading books, going to plays, and other forms of engagement with the narrative arts. In terms of instant gratification, D&D loses badly when compared to a sport wherein you can see yourself physically accomplishing something, or a computer game where you can see an outcome on screen right now. D&D is all in your imagination. It takes a cerebral person to appreciate this hobby.Given that there are many, often non-nerdy people who will sit down for days at a time and marathon serialized TV shows, or obsessively devote themselves to popular novel series that the author takes years to finish, I think that there are people out there that are patient enough to enjoy D&D.That being said, this hobby is about human interactions, and to me it is wise for the DM (not the rules, the DM), to throw the players a bone and show them why his campaign is going to be enjoyable for them.</blockquote>

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