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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9855094" data-attributes="member: 7026617">That's tautological though; its not part of D&D because they decided not to do it.  There's no internal logic for doing climbing and swimming by descriptive decisions that wouldn't work just as well with combat.That was my point; if you don't need to have mechanics for climbing or swimming, you don't need them for combat either.  If you're going to draw a line, drawing one between physical activities and mental/social ones can make some sense, but drawing it between different physical activity doesn't.  Its, at best, just naked preference with no internal logic to it.I'm sorry and I sincerely don't want to be offensive, but unless its a case of "I know so much about it that I'd have trouble designing a systemic approach to it that wouldn't be excessive" (which can absolutely be a problem with systems designed by people extremely knowledgable in a field; its why usually the best thing to do when someone starts getting overly antsy about how hacking or similar systems in SF gamesare done, who are coming from a position of knowledge is to ignore them, because they're running into problems with any abstraction at all rather than with how the abstraction is done in the majority of cases), I'm finding it simply impossible to square "I know a lot about rock climbing, but can't think of a useful interactive way to mechanic that" when I can think of ways to do that with swimming where there's a lot less situational decisions to make.  Call it the limits of my imagination if you prefer.It is, however, how you'd need to do it if you wanted descriptive narration to do the lifting the way some people seem to think would have been appropriate back in the day.  My only point was "Yes, you could do that, the same way you could do it with combat."  That we don't do that (at least to those degrees) was rather my point.Yup.  That's the kind of thing I'm saying it seems some people wanted to do with climbing if they didn't want some kind of resolution mechanic.I'd find that a little more credible if D&D hadn't been from day one so incredibly non-interactive in how it ran the defensive end of combat, especially in the OD&D days.  There were no defensive rolls, and really no defensive choices short of "run away" once you engaged.  You were effectively standing there with two relevant traits: your AC and your hit points.  There was no decisions to make.There are games that are more interactive than that, but OD&D in particular was certainly not one of them.I think you're privledging RPG mechanics over board game mechanics in a way I don't think stands up.</blockquote>

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