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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 4021902" data-attributes="member: 467">RPGs are very different from other kinds of games.  Although there may be mechanical similarities, although many games involve groups of people getting together to have fun, RPGs have a number of components that make them special.  First and foremost, they are open and free in a way that other games cannot be.  The best RPGs embrace this openness and freedom and even while they very often have a specific setting, genre and tone, they are built not to tell the people using them how to ave fun, but provide the users with tools to make their own fun.  Among these tools the ability to choose from a wide variety of options that can be embraced or ignored, switches that can be turned on and off, to allow the users to do this.It is "generally bad" to build every D&D class as a fully capable combatant because it takes a tool out of the toolbox.  While I understand that some players scoff at the idea that it might be fun to play a character that hides under a table anytime a bar fight breaks out, we all have seen exactly this in other forms of entertainment and found it to be both entertaining and internally consistent with the character.  in an RPG, that would translate to being fun to play.  It so happens that D&D is a class based game (or, in the parlance of 4E, a role based game).  As such, providing the tool that is a character that doesn't have superhuman combat ability means providing a class that allows this.  Or, more to the point, it means *not* requiring that every character be a skilled combatant.  because when you do that, you (as in, the designer) is defining fun for your users instead of giving them the tools to make their own fun.</blockquote>

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