D&D General When Was it Decided Fighters Should Suck at Everything but Combat?

[Bill Zebub]

Because that was the context my participation came up in, when someone suggested that it was a mistake to have any skill functions beyond what existed with OD&D fighters. My argument was that you could, perhaps, from a certain perspective make that argument in those days about mental or social sphere things, but not physical sphere things. Everything I've argued since is derived from my taking issue with that point; anything beyond that are things others have dragged in that I've responded to.



They often don't even get to chose who to attack depending on layout, and I don't consider "Deciding when to run away" a meaningful tactical choice; its just acknowledgement that the fight has already failed out.



This is a case where my argument has wandered because of others participation and my responses. Let me re-present it to make where I'm coming from clear:

The argument from at least one early respondant at least seemed to be that no other skill beyond what was already present in the combat system was need, because the rest could be handled purely with narration. My counter was if you could do that with other complex and environmentally sensetive physical skills like climbing, swimming (and though less common riding and boating), you could just as easily do it with combat too (and noted I've been in games where that was how it was, indeed, handled). That in practice there is not a major self-evident difference where one deserves mechanical representation and the other doesn't. As you can see from my point of view, the differences you site in combat and the others are not relevant, because the D&D sphere, especially that early on (again, remember this was triggered by a comment about when skills first began to appear in one form or another), most of the theoretical differences were already being abstracted away anyway (and I'm not convinced in any significant fashion that changed up through D&D 4e at least).

Is what I'm arguing about here a little clearer at least? (I'll freely admit I don't consider there being an intrinsic reason handling climbing and some other skills should have a less developed mechanic system that combat is required is necessarily true, but I'm also not arguing in favor of doing it, barring a game that's going to be doing things with climbing very regularly. But its not really what I'm talking about here in any case).

Great clarification, thanks.

I had strayed from what you rightly point out was the premise here, whether OD&D was sufficient, because I don't really find that an interesting or useful thing to discuss. I'm more interested in what we can learn from past editions (of all games), what bits and pieces we can keep, discard, or revive, and what needs to be refined and redesigned. With the recognition that we really need lots of different solutions, because there are so many preferences.

I really would love to have out-of-combat be mechanically interesting in the way combat itself is, and I think about that problem a lot. So far the only solution I have is an unsatisfactory one, and is along the lines of my climbing example above: wherever possible, insert a difficult (and possibly improvised) trade-off that may require a dice roll.

N.B.: the other factor I forgot to mention that I think is critical to making combat fun is some form of action economy: you get to do something on your turn, but you'd better make a good choice because then the environment gets to take its own turn. And the environment does not like you.

 

[Thomas Shey]

@W'rkncacnter's post above made me look again at your earlier post.

I don't really agree that just because there's a mountain to climb there should be "climbing rolls"...unless there are difficult decisions to be made along the way. An example might be:
"A bird is flying straight toward the cliff. Bob, you're a druid and you immediately realize it's strange that an owl is out and about during the day."
"It's a spy! Is there any cover we get to?"
"Well, there are a few small, stunted trees sticking out the rocks. You might be able to use those, but it will take a Stealth roll. There's also big crack you might be able to scramble to if you hurry. I'll need a Climbing check; anybody who fails will slide down partway, will have to save to avoid a little bit of damage, and will lose one round of climbing time."

But I would never just say, "Ok, I'll need five successive climbing checks to get to the top of the mountain. For each failure (some consequence)." I just don't find that very fun or interesting.

Then I can ask why you'd do that with an interim combat that isn't likely to be necessarily any more fun or interesting. If you wouldn't, you're not the person my argument is really directed at.

Also, this is somewhat tangential to the thread topic, but something that occurred to me while thinking about all this that one reason that combat skill is separated from non-combat skills in so many RPGs is that so many games really are combat heavy, and if you to allocate the same points across combat and non-combat, most people are going to go heavy in the combat. So one resources goes into improving combat, and another resource is spent on skills.

To some extent, sure. But that can be handled, depending on the game, by the amount of spendable resource and capping. There are plenty of games that give you X number points where you can cover the basic ground for combat with a lot less than X, so there's still room for plenty of other things. This is particularly easy in games with either pretty broad categories (Savage Worlds: Shooting) or narrow ones, because investing in either allows you to cover the weapons you're likely to really need; in some of these, spending more on broader combat options isn't always even useful to combat specialists. And of course you can have your cost system have diminishing returns (so a tiny bit more combat capability at some point costs as much as buying a number of other non-combat bonuses).

D&D doesn't do that because its carrying a legacy where combat and spellcasting capabilities existed as their own thing in the mechanical structure since day one, and by the time even the prototypical skills came in (non-combat proficiencies) it was unlikeyly they were going to back up and change that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Great clarification, thanks.

I should have done it earlier, honestly, when I started to note drift had confused the argument.

I had strayed from what you rightly point out was the premise here, whether OD&D was sufficient, because I don't really find that an interesting or useful thing to discuss. I'm more interested in what we can learn from past editions (of all games), what bits and pieces we can keep, discard, or revive, and what needs to be refined and redesigned. With the recognition that we really need lots of different solutions, because there are so many preferences.

Well, I allowed myself to get dragged along with you because it came off my original point, but it ended up making me kind of go down a rabbithole that I think is far afield of the theoretical topic of this thread.

I really would love to have out-of-combat be mechanically interesting in the way combat itself is, and I think about that problem a lot. So far the only solution I have is an unsatisfactory one, and is along the lines of my climbing example above: wherever possible, insert a difficult (and possibly improvised) trade-off that may require a dice roll.

I've seen ways to do it. There's no question they add handling time to a game though, which is why its rarely done outside specific areas of importance to the system/genre.

N.B.: the other factor I forgot to mention that I think is critical to making combat fun is some form of action economy: you get to do something on your turn, but you'd better make a good choice because then the environment gets to take its own turn. And the environment does not like you.

I don't think I'd have an argument with that.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Maybe the answer is to somehow move away from a strict rotating turn-based system?

Yes! I'm always interested in those kinds of mechanics. For example, the boss gets to immediately attack anybody who attacks it.

In 1e, in theory everyone declared their actions at the start of the round and then they all resolved at once. This came with its own issues, of course.

I'm also super interested in simultaneous resolution mechanics. Long live the board game Diplomacy! One of my friends is still mad at me, 20ish years later.

Rerolling initiative each round can help. Using a smaller die for initiative can also help. Allowing initiative ties and simultaneous actions (which WotC D&D seems to abhor, for some reason) is essential.

Dragonbane has some cool & interesting mechanics around initiative order. The main one being that there are advantages to going early, but other advantages to going later.

I suppose the same principles could be applied to non-combat activities but in many situations there the "opponent" (the cliff you're climbing, the secret door you seek, etc.) isn't actively fighting back, meaning the action is all on one side.

As noted earlier, I think this is really an important factor.

I once ran an encounter where enemies kept showing up (unpredictably, based on dice rolls each round) and really the only way to end the encounter was to raise the portcullis and escape. But that really needed two people, and was hard to do while being attacked. So the winch itself wasn't making decisions, and raising the portcullis was in some ways just one of those sustained skill (or attribute) rolls that I've been pooh-poohing, except that the guards were "the environment" taking its turns. And of course the PCs that were best at raising a portcullis were also the best at holding back guards. Decisions, decisions.

That was a really fun encounter. "Uh-oh...I rolled a 1! More guards arrive!"

And really 100% the players' fault for letting the first two guards get to the alarm gong....

 

[Thomas Shey]

Maybe the answer is to somehow move away from a strict rotating turn-based system?

In 1e, in theory everyone declared their actions at the start of the round and then they all resolved at once. This came with its own issues, of course.

Rerolling initiative each round can help. Using a smaller die for initiative can also help. Allowing initiative ties and simultaneous actions (which WotC D&D seems to abhor, for some reason) is essential.

The problem with reroll initiative is I'm never sold its worth the handling time, and it can sometimes create some artifacts that aren't at least self-evidently representing anything useful (this is more likely to be an issue with larger ranges of initiative).

You can simply have set initiative in a game; though its part of a more complex interplay of actions and such, the Hero System has defaulted to set initiative from the get go.

I suppose the same principles could be applied to non-combat activities but in many situations there the "opponent" (the cliff you're climbing, the secret door you seek, etc.) isn't actively fighting back, meaning the action is all on one side.

Though there you have to sometimes decide if you're going to bake everything that happens in the world into your skill roll. As an example with climbing, if your grip crumbles, that's a sudden problem, and it doesn't have anything to do with what you did, per se; there are similar situations that can come with swimming under some circumstances. This doesn't mean you necessarily want to handle those separately, but then, single-roll attack resolution doesn't do that either.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Then I can ask why you'd do that with an interim combat that isn't likely to be necessarily any more fun or interesting. If you wouldn't, you're not the person my argument is really directed at.

By "interim" combat, do you mean lesser fight on the way to the BBEG?

If so, I guess I have two different takes, that aren't necessarily in alignment:

First, somehow it's just satisfying to smack down those low level mobs, even if there's no challenge or decision-making of exactly the kind of been advocating. Yes, it undermines my whole argument. But...but...it's true! There's something about imagining carving through goblins like Conan going through a harem...I mean, um, band of pirates that just wouldn't be satisfying without the dice roll, and in a way that is not at all replicated by crushing the Climb roll by a wide margin, or totally dominating that cheap lock. It's just not the same!

Really, I blame my parents. If they had just bought me that Atari in 1983 I wouldn't be this way now.

Or maybe it's Jen T.'s fault, for not reciprocating the crush I had on her from 1st through 6th grade. (She ended up marrying my frenemy from middle school. Can you believe it?!?!?!)

Um, where was I...

Oh, yeah, my OTHER take is that I find the whole game strategy of "conserve resources for the BBEG, and then rest up afterward to refill your resources" to not be really satisfying, either. As I've stated in many posts, I dislike having powers gated behind finite resources, whether it's a pool of bonus dice, or spell slots, or just "3x/day" stuff. I don't enjoy the game of guessing whether I should use my precious special abilities in this fight, or save them for a harder fight. I want my strategy to be focused on the present moment, not predictions about the rest of the adventuring day. EVERY fight should be an all-out, desperate effort to kill before being killed. The reason you can kill all those goblins with ease is BECAUSE you are fighting for your life.

I don't know exactly how you design a game to do that, but I do know that powering abilities with finite resources is the antithesis of it. Special abilities should either be usable circumstantially (e.g. positioning, teamwork, reactively, or maybe even by RNG) or as a trade-off where the benefit comes with an immediate cost (e.g. Barbarian's "Reckless Attack").

EDIT: Possibly my one beef with Shadowdark is that Kelsey still occasionally slips in those "3x/day" kinds of abilities.