Quote from: jrientsNot that I'm big on harshing other people's play styles, but I don't really see the point of using the D&D system for games that don't involve a lot of mayhem.  It strikes me as buying a sportscar simply for Sunday drives through the park.  Aren't there better systems for non-violence oriented fantasy gaming?

When did we get from "[not] only about combat" to "non-violence oriented fantasy"? There is a difference.

Personally, my minimum is one combat per game. I find my players get itchy if they don't get that much. But I find that the game has good enough skill support to handle investigation and infiltration style games, and don't feel a lot of need for personality mechanics and similar nonsense.

Quote from: jrientsNot that I'm big on harshing other people's play styles, but I don't really see the point of using the D&D system for games that don't involve a lot of mayhem.  It strikes me as buying a sportscar simply for Sunday drives through the park.  Aren't there better systems for non-violence oriented fantasy gaming?

It depends how you define mayhem

When I run D&D there are only a couple of combat encounters per session. That may not be much for most folks, but my players do a hell of a lot of damage during those dust ups. D&D has a nice feel to it. It does a certain kind of fantasy really well  (and I love running these kinds of games)- which is probably why D&D will remain a constant in my gaming life.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: One Horse TownI've seen it as a debating point before about the combat-based nature of d&d (d20), that xps are only given out for duffing up monsters. I don't think here, but it's out there.

Well, for some values of "here". In this site's ex-alter-ego Nutkinland, it was a pretty big wailing point for some of the local d20 malcontents.

Quote from: jrientsNot that I'm big on harshing other people's play styles, but I don't really see the point of using the D&D system for games that don't involve a lot of mayhem.  It strikes me as buying a sportscar simply for Sunday drives through the park.  Aren't there better systems for non-violence oriented fantasy gaming?

My Aunt, who would avoid major highways whenever possible because she preferred to drive the speed limit and isn't a daredevil driver, still buys cars with the biggest engines she could find (she used to buy big V-8s) so she'd have the power to pull out into traffic and so forth if she needed in.  She didn't have the V-8 for normal driving and she's the sort of person who drives the speed limit.  She had those big engines so that she'd be able to deal with more unusual situations easily.  The problem is that if you use a system that simply glosses combat over, if it does come up, it may not produce a very satisfying experience.  That doesn't mean that you need something quite as heavy as D&D 3e but it does mean that it's not useless in D&D 3e, even if you don't use it very much.

Quote from: David RWhen I run D&D there are only a couple of combat encounters per session.

In the last D&D 3.5 game that I played in, there were sessions with no combat encounters and plenty of non-combat rolls and activities throughout.  I didn't find the non-combat skills rolls in D&D worked all that badly and were probably as good as most other systems, including lightweight systems hailed as non-combat oriented that try to treat combat as just another sort of conflict.  The main place where the heavy D&D combat mechanics get in the way when you aren't using them is when you create a character or level up, because you need to calculate a lot of combat values.  Other than that, they are easy enough to ignore if you aren't in combat.

Quote from: John MorrowIn the last D&D 3.5 game that I played in, there were sessions with no combat encounters and plenty of non-combat rolls and activities throughout.  I didn't find the non-combat skills rolls in D&D worked all that badly and were probably as good as most other systems, including lightweight systems hailed as non-combat oriented that try to treat combat as just another sort of conflict.  The main place where the heavy D&D combat mechanics get in the way when you aren't using them is when you create a character or level up, because you need to calculate a lot of combat values.  Other than that, they are easy enough to ignore if you aren't in combat.

Yeah. But with the folks I game with, combat is a must (well, there must be a reason for the combat... ) I've never encountered any problems with the non-combat skills myself. But I do think IME anyway, combat is a big draw of D&D. I use it for a whole lot of other stuff though...and it supports such play.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: droogI think it's all very simple and it's a matter of history.

While I think there is some truth to that, especially when you are dealing with systems that clone other systems without questioning their assumptions and just make a few changes or improvements, I don't think that's the whole story.  I think you were closer to the real issue when you sid, "And with combat comes the removal of units. Fighting meant life or death, and that became the implicit stakes in RPGs – does my character live or die?"

Over the years, I've played in least as many games with homebrew systems (especially if you count our variant of Fudge combined with elements from our homebrew systems) than published systems.  We did plenty of experimentation down to no dice and no rules.  I see plenty of evidence that lots of other people have, too, including all of the non-D&D published games that started out "indie" (in the designer-owned and published sense).  

Yet the games that treat combat as an abstraction like a lock-picking roll or treat all conflicts the same, whether it's throwing shuriken or insults, never seem to get a lot of traction.  They exist.  There are people who want them to work.  Yet they never gain a lot of popularity.  And I think that's because there is more to the detailed combat rules than just tradition.  Combat is the one part of the game where one character tries to make another character die.  It doesn't get much more serious or important than that.  And thus I think the focus on combat is a reflection of how serious and important it is.

To put it another way, you don't see the dialog scenes in The Matrix filmed in "bullet time".  And where there are other examples that sometimes get the slow motion treatment in movies, like jumping a chasm, many rule systems have more detailed rules for those things (e.g., jumping and Superleap rules in Champions).  Dialog, cooking contests, hacking a computer, and so on just don't have the second-to-second drama that combat does.  

For example, the key hacking scene in the movie Hackers (which was not as bad of a computer movie as it could have been) was handled as a montage that didn't show much of anything and other hacking scenes looked like the director had a tough time making them interesting on screen, even though they were sometimes saying all of the right things.  Lots of things are glossed over or handled in montage in movies but combat rarely is, unless it's because of the sheer number of combatants or the length of the combat (through long stretches where nothing changes).  Most movies are much closer to The Matrix, which has a fetish for combat that will rival any rule systems.

Quote from: droogFor me, two of Greg Costikyan's games blew that idea apart. In Paranoia it didn't matter if your chr died because you had half a dozen clones. In Toon your chr couldn't die at all. You might say these were edge cases, but they demonstrated that, in principle, the stakes didn't have to be life and death.

Both of those games went to extremes to be the way they were and I don't think they had much more of an impact on the hobby than his game Violence did.  Consider what you just said that he had to do to make combat not be a life and death issue for the players -- he had to either make it not matter if your character dies (by making the characters as disposable as a Kleenex tissue) or by making it impossible for a character to die.  That's a pretty narrow niche he had to find to escape the reality that combat normally is a life and death situation.

Quote from: droogSo the problem for some of us has been not "How do we get rid of combat?" but "How do we make anything else interesting?"

As I mentioned earlier, I think many people make a mistake of thinking that more rules will make other things interesting and I think that's often a mistake.  There are other ways to make other things interesting (e.g., equipment lists full of non-combat gear).

Quote from: droogPeople say "Why don't you just ROLEPLAY IT?" To which my reply is: engaging the system is fun. You have fun rolling dice and angling for modifiers in combat, why shouldn't I have fun rolling dice etc in other situations as well?

Well, I would argue that "angling for modifiers" instead of using modifiers to reflect what's going on in the situation is playing the system (aka "Gamist").  I don't consider adding up modifiers or rolling dice to be a "fun" thing I want to increase.  As an analogy, traffic lights and stop signs help make driving safe and efficient and I'm happy they are there (and wouldn't want most of them removed) but that doesn't mean that I like to stop at them nor does it mean I want them added to hallways for pedestrians, supermarket aisles for customers, and so on.  So are you basically making an argument on the basis of enjoyment of playing the system or is there something else you are trying to get at?

Uh, John, dude. You're doing it again. You're arguing against my personal preference. You're hinting that I don't know what I enjoy. It doesn't make sense to do that.

It's kind of like this:

Me: I like green tea icecream. I'd like to see more of it served up.
You: Well, green tea icecream isn't what most peole enjoy, they get along perfectly well with vanilla, and you can put green tea flavouring on your vanilla anyway if you really need to, and green tea icecream is a very small niche that isn't worth bothering about, and anyway, I find a lot of people who think they like green tea icecream are mistaken and what they really want is vanilla....

Whatever is fun, do it. Wang Chung, man.  Life's too short to play games you do not enjoy.

When I game, I want to be awesome.  I want to be the main man, meng -- at whatever my character does.  It's fun.

Sometimes I want to be the guy with all the answers.  Or the hotshot pilot who rocks.  

In many cases, this is my idea of awesome:



So why should I avoid that?  

Life's too short.  Play games the way you want to.

Quote from: droogUh, John, dude. You're doing it again. You're arguing against my personal preference. You're hinting that I don't know what I enjoy. It doesn't make sense to do that.

Um, at least 3/4 of my reply was about your interpretation of why game systems deal with combat the way they do.  That's not a statement about preference and I disagree with what you were saying.  In fact, I went out of my way to find parts of your argument I agreed with so you wouldn't think I was just disagreeing to disagree.

As for the last part, it almost seems like you are trying to find offense sometimes by interpreting any question about what you say as a personal insult.  Lighten up.  I don't know how you can endure debates on the Internet if you are that sensitive about getting your feelings hurt.

In my reply, I was stating my preference, too.  I'm allowed to do that, right?  I don't think more rules and die rolls are an inherently good thing and I explained why.  

I'm trying to figure out if you were really saying that you'd like more rules for those things because you find manipulating the rules and rolling dice a key part of the fun you have role-playing (i.e., "Gamist" reasons) or whether I'm misreading your comment.  If you enjoy playing with the rules and dice, there is nothing wrong with that.  Really.

Quote from: droogIt's kind of like this:

Me: I like green tea icecream. I'd like to see more of it served up.
You: Well, green tea icecream isn't what most peole enjoy, they get along perfectly well with vanilla, and you can put green tea flavouring on your vanilla anyway if you really need to, and green tea icecream is a very small niche that isn't worth bothering about, and anyway, I find a lot of people who think they like green tea icecream are mistaken and what they really want is vanilla....

No.  It was more like:

You: The reason why people eat more vanilla and chocolate ice cream is that those were the first flavors and people just continue to eat them out of tradition.  I like green tea ice cream because I like tea and there should be more food that taste like tea.

Me: It's not like green tea ice cream hasn't been around and it's not like a lot of people haven't tried it, yet it's still not very popular.  That suggests that the reason for the popularity isn't just tradition but maybe it doesn't give people what they are looking for in green tea.  While I like tea just fine as a drink, I really don't want a lot of the other things I eat to taste like tea because that's not what I want to taste when I eat ice cream, for example.  Are you really saying that you eat green tea ice cream for the taste of the tea rather than one of the other reasons why people normally eat ice cream such as the creaminess, texture, or coolness?

I prefer dulce de leche, Haagen-Daz when possible.

Quote from: John MorrowAs for the last part, it almost seems like you are trying to find offense sometimes by interpreting any question about what you say as a personal insult.  Lighten up.  I don't know how you can endure debates on the Internet if you are that sensitive about getting your feelings hurt.

I'm not insulted. I was initially, but I think it's just your arguing style. I'm finding it very irritating, not least because it's basically apologetics. And so very copious.

That whole long rant about The Matrix and Hackers is surely beside the point. First, they're films, not RPGs. Second, I've already addressed the popularity of RPGs with combat-heavy systems. See if you can find it.

Quote from: John MorrowI'm trying to figure out if you were really saying that you'd like more rules for those things because you find manipulating the rules and rolling dice a key part of the fun you have role-playing (i.e., "Gamist" reasons) or whether I'm misreading your comment.  If you enjoy playing with the rules and dice, there is nothing wrong with that.  Really.

Thanks. It's nice of you to say so.

How about just reading what I wrote?

People say "Why don't you just ROLEPLAY IT?" To which my reply is: engaging the system is fun. You have fun rolling dice and angling for modifiers in combat, why shouldn't I have fun rolling dice etc in other situations as well?

Which bit of that is hard to understand? Why are you dragging in jargon when there's no need for it?

Quote from: James McMurrayI prefer dulce de leche, Haagen-Daz when possible.

You pretentious git!

Fuck you, you lousy bastard! Who do you think you are to impose your ice cream preferences on me or my hobby? I'm hereby declaring war on all legless bowlers. You may have launched the first salvo but I'll be damned if I won't launch the last!