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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7621324" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I mean in the broad sense of XP for GP; you could still gain a lot of XP by tricking the dragon or stealing from it as opposed to fighting it. The treasure was the goal, so you were heavily incentivized to get the treasure.So when the game shifted away from dungeon delving more toward heroic mission type of adventures, treasure was less of a motivation. Instead it was about stopping the bad guys, or about saving people....from the bad guys. And you dealt with bad guys by killing them. Well, this is all based on my personal experience, so I wouldn’t expect it to he universal. That being said, I wouldn’t describe 3E’s skill system as exhaustive. It’s pretty basic. I think they divided the necessary skills more than needed, so it seems like a bigger deal than it is. But it was certainly an improvement over Non-Weapon Proficiencies, for sure, and the protection of the Thief/Rogue as the only skilled character. It was a step in the right direction. And I’m not blaming the introduction of a skill system for the increased focus on combat in 3E. It was more about the codification of everything, and challenge rating and XP budgets and all of that. In the 1E era, when faced with an encounter, a party of PCs wasn’t always sure if it was a winnable by combat. I think this was less so in 2E, and then even less true in 3E. Challenge rating and encounter budgets and the like really reinforced the numbers game. Encounters were expected to be within a range of difficulty, but never truly beyond the party’s ability. And yes, there were more options for task based XP, but I found those in published modules to be nominal when compared to the XP gained through combat. Especially since you could still get the mission based XP by slaughtering all who opposed you. It’s why my group essentially adopted the milestone leveling model (though it wasn’t called that yet) in this edition. It helped mitigate some of the problems we found with the design versus play expectations we had. Ultimately,  violence is so prevalent in RPGs because it (a) is baked into the most frequently used genres for games, (b) is the most obvious expression of the core of all drama: conflict, and (c) lends itself to mechanical expression for games. The tropes that tend to be present in many genres, and also the gaminess itself, helps to abstract the violence in a way that makes it much easier to gloss over.</blockquote>

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