As I already asked: Why does every single member of a party have to fight when combat breaks out? Is there absolutely nothing else a wizard could possibly do? Is there no utility spell that might be utilized to continue doing whatever the party were doing before they were attacked? Is there some compelling reason the wizard simply cannot avoid the fray to instead move beyond the location in which the fight is taking place and make itself useful there? Making every class combat-ready is an awfully myopic approach to a game with which there are really no limits to the stories we can tell at our tables. If every time combat breaks out every single member of the party enters combat mode that is about as two-dimensional as storytelling can get.
This is not a story. This is a game. This is a game that considers combat to be the most mechanically important part of the game. It deals with it far more granularly than it does anything else, so it consumes an enormous percentage of play time.
If a player regularly does not get to participate in the most significant part of the game, that is a problem of the design. The low-mid-level AD&D wizard had very few utility spells to even use, because they had to spend all their memorized spells for combat-related ones, because that was where the game was, and they had nothing else to do.
EDIT: I'm curious to know if you reckon it is "bad" and that everyone else in an adventuring party is "a useless bozo" when it's the party's most charismatic getting the party out of trouble say? Is it "bad" and is everyone else "a useless bozo" when a member of a party does something during "downtime" that does not concern others? Does everyone else in the party have to hold the rogue's hand as he or she navigates through some business with a guild with which he or she has become affiliated? Why is it just combat in which everyone must play an active role? Must fight? You don't think this overemphasizes the role of combat in a game that is about so much more?
If you're playing out your social interactions at even ten percent the level of mechanical granularity as combat, D&D is the wrong game for you.
Also, combat is regularly a whole-party endeavor. The wizards should be able to participate because they are there. When somebody wanders off to do a thing, nobody else is there. It's also typically short. If there's a lengthy solo thing going on, one tends to arrange for a side session for that player, so you don't have a lengthy period where not everyone is playing. (IIRC that's was a common complaint about older cyberpunk games, where the decker would be doing a separate thing from the rest of the team, and it led to lots of downtime for other players.)
Roleplaying social situations usually involves the other players, even if they're not the ones making the roll. They're there, doing their thing in-character. Maybe they're helping. Maybe they're hurting, but they're active.
WRT to failure rates in magic, it is not the concept that is flawed, but a question of implementation. Let;s work with the Shadowdark version. You cast a spell. Say it is a 1st level spell. If I remember correctly, the "DC" was 10 plus the spell level, so in this case, 11. A d20 is rolled against that number, and the PC's Int bonus was tacked on. Assuming a +3 to Int, that would mean a 65% chance of a 1st level spell working properly. I can't remember if the caster level was also added to that d20 roll, but it would make sense to. So, going with 5e stats, we could have a 4th level caster, with an 18 Int (+4), and now that DC 11 is going to succeed 90% of the time. Now, that almost trivializes the risk. But some modification to that mechanic would create a situation where casters could, and should, fail occasionally.
Yeah I get that, but that is on top of the already built-in failure rates (saving throws, missing to hit rolls). Its a bit like adding a % miss chance to attacks on top the already existing to hit roll. Its sort of like a double penalty in many cases when it comes to magic in 5e.
Easy fix: get rid of having casters having to make attack rolls or their targets having to make saves. You roll to cast and it works or it doesn't.
That is how ShadowDark handles spellcasting. The caster does not additionally have to make an attack roll and targets do not additionally have to make saves.
This streamlines spellcasting.
One of the beautiful things about 5E is the simplicity of its core mechanic. You want to do something. You are given a target number. You roll a d20. Add or subtract any modifiers. Meet or beat that target number. Done.
Were all spells handled as simply as requesting the caster make a roll it would be simpler. Expecting particularly new players to remember which spells require an attack roll and which ones require saves be made when wizards these days have more spells than necessary unnecessarily complicates things. I have been playing and running D&D for 41 years. And I laugh when people talk about all the unnecessary rules in AD&D. Because I had no trouble then remembering everything to be remembered about one of my players' characters without consulting the rules. Fewer spells that would be in a character's arsenal. Now there is constant page-turning to be reminded how any one spell might work in that regard. Even other DMs I know and with whom I have played have found this to be the case. Constant page-turning at their tables. Or constantly having to look up this or that spell online.
You yourself admit a spell already has a chance of failure. If an attack roll or save is needed. Why not eliminate that and just replace it with something simpler?
Easy fix: get rid of having casters having to make attack rolls or their targets having to make saves. You roll to cast and it works or it doesn't.
Static target numbers that don't depend on the traits of the target are bad, and if you are making the TN depend on target traits... it's an attack roll.
As I already asked: Why does every single member of a party have to fight when combat breaks out? Is there absolutely nothing else a wizard could possibly do? Is there no utility spell that might be utilized to continue doing whatever the party were doing before they were attacked? Is there some compelling reason the wizard simply cannot avoid the fray to instead move beyond the location in which the fight is taking place and make itself useful there? Making every class combat-ready is an awfully myopic approach to a game with which there are really no limits to the stories we can tell at our tables. If every time combat breaks out every single member of the party enters combat mode that is about as two-dimensional as storytelling can get.
This is not a story. This is a game. This is a game that considers combat to be the most mechanically important part of the game. It deals with it far more granularly than it does anything else, so it consumes an enormous percentage of play time.
If a player regularly does not get to participate in the most significant part of the game, that is a problem of the design. The low-mid-level AD&D wizard had very few utility spells to even use, because they had to spend all their memorized spells for combat-related ones, because that was where the game was, and they had nothing else to do.
EDIT: I'm curious to know if you reckon it is "bad" and that everyone else in an adventuring party is "a useless bozo" when it's the party's most charismatic getting the party out of trouble say? Is it "bad" and is everyone else "a useless bozo" when a member of a party does something during "downtime" that does not concern others? Does everyone else in the party have to hold the rogue's hand as he or she navigates through some business with a guild with which he or she has become affiliated? Why is it just combat in which everyone must play an active role? Must fight? You don't think this overemphasizes the role of combat in a game that is about so much more?
If you're playing out your social interactions at even ten percent the level of mechanical granularity as combat, D&D is the wrong game for you.
Also, combat is regularly a whole-party endeavor. The wizards should be able to participate because they are there. When somebody wanders off to do a thing, nobody else is there. It's also typically short. If there's a lengthy solo thing going on, one tends to arrange for a side session for that player, so you don't have a lengthy period where not everyone is playing. (IIRC that's was a common complaint about older cyberpunk games, where the decker would be doing a separate thing from the rest of the team, and it led to lots of downtime for other players.)
Roleplaying social situations usually involves the other players, even if they're not the ones making the roll. They're there, doing their thing in-character. Maybe they're helping. Maybe they're hurting, but they're active.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition. But even today not all games played are saturated with combat. It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure. When that is pretty much what you are saying 5E is really about.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
I have played in campaigns that stretched into aeons in which little to no all-out combat took place. Because they were more about intrigue et cetera. There were published adventure modules back in the day geared towards this type of game. You need to stop acting as if you speak for the game itself and know what it considers most important when what you really mean is you are one of those players who tires easily if there is no combat in any given session.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
Those who pioneered table-top role-playing games did so by taking what were just combat games—wargames—and asking themselves what are the stories of each and every one of these miniatures? Why can't they have lives? Histories? Personalities? Why cant they do things outside of their just fighting?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
EDIT: I remember when 3rd. Edition first dropped. It was the first of the editions to assume combat would be resolved using miniatures and this not just being something that might be done but that was entirely unnecessary given theatre of the mind would suffice. The language used to describe combat was more wargame-y. Instead of more abstract. I remember well at the time how many said Wizards were turning D&D into a wargame. A combat simulation game. How this broke with the spirit of the game as an exercise in theater of the mind and one that could be of emergent storytelling when things like sandboxes were used and not just linear and scripted adventures. The idea that combat is oh-so-important to the game and that a game of D&D is not or never has been more about weaving a story is preposterous.
Easy fix: get rid of having casters having to make attack rolls or their targets having to make saves. You roll to cast and it works or it doesn't.
Static target numbers that don't depend on the traits of the target are bad, and if you are making the TN depend on target traits... it's an attack roll.
You have a tendency to use the word "bad" as if you are the grand arbiter of what is good in good design. Like you expect us to just lose memories of having played D&D at a time when casters had fewer spells and would run out of them—You know? Like they did in the Vance novels that once inspired how magic worked in the game?—and insist those experiences must have been "bad." For everyone.
ShadowDark took home four ENNIEs including the one for best rules. The praise and promotion the game has received is practically unprecedented among games not called D&D. But we are supposed to believe how it handles magic is "bad" ... because you say so?
As I already asked: Why does every single member of a party have to fight when combat breaks out? Is there absolutely nothing else a wizard could possibly do? Is there no utility spell that might be utilized to continue doing whatever the party were doing before they were attacked? Is there some compelling reason the wizard simply cannot avoid the fray to instead move beyond the location in which the fight is taking place and make itself useful there? Making every class combat-ready is an awfully myopic approach to a game with which there are really no limits to the stories we can tell at our tables. If every time combat breaks out every single member of the party enters combat mode that is about as two-dimensional as storytelling can get.
This is not a story. This is a game. This is a game that considers combat to be the most mechanically important part of the game. It deals with it far more granularly than it does anything else, so it consumes an enormous percentage of play time.
If a player regularly does not get to participate in the most significant part of the game, that is a problem of the design. The low-mid-level AD&D wizard had very few utility spells to even use, because they had to spend all their memorized spells for combat-related ones, because that was where the game was, and they had nothing else to do.
EDIT: I'm curious to know if you reckon it is "bad" and that everyone else in an adventuring party is "a useless bozo" when it's the party's most charismatic getting the party out of trouble say? Is it "bad" and is everyone else "a useless bozo" when a member of a party does something during "downtime" that does not concern others? Does everyone else in the party have to hold the rogue's hand as he or she navigates through some business with a guild with which he or she has become affiliated? Why is it just combat in which everyone must play an active role? Must fight? You don't think this overemphasizes the role of combat in a game that is about so much more?
If you're playing out your social interactions at even ten percent the level of mechanical granularity as combat, D&D is the wrong game for you.
Also, combat is regularly a whole-party endeavor. The wizards should be able to participate because they are there. When somebody wanders off to do a thing, nobody else is there. It's also typically short. If there's a lengthy solo thing going on, one tends to arrange for a side session for that player, so you don't have a lengthy period where not everyone is playing. (IIRC that's was a common complaint about older cyberpunk games, where the decker would be doing a separate thing from the rest of the team, and it led to lots of downtime for other players.)
Roleplaying social situations usually involves the other players, even if they're not the ones making the roll. They're there, doing their thing in-character. Maybe they're helping. Maybe they're hurting, but they're active.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition. But even today not all games played are saturated with combat. It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure. When that is pretty much what you are saying 5E is really about.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
I have played in campaigns that stretched into aeons in which little to no all-out combat took place. Because they were more about intrigue et cetera. There were published adventure modules back in the day geared towards this type of game. You need to stop acting as if you speak for the game itself and know what it considers most important when what you really mean is you are one of those players who tires easily if there is no combat in any given session.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
Those who pioneered table-top role-playing games did so by taking what were just combat games—wargames—and asking themselves what are the stories of each and every one of these miniatures? Why can't they have lives? Histories? Personalities? Why cant they do things outside of their just fighting?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
I'm going to have to disagree here with the combat in ADnD part. Back in the day, there was just as much combat as there is here. At least with the people I played with. We ran literal dungeon crawls where we would be in combat for multiple sessions. This didn't take away from the story or roleplaying either. The DMs I played with were able to weave fascinating stories along with having a plethora of combat mixed into the campaign. And when we got into the high levels (15+), we still were out looking for gold, treasure and glory.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's all about what the players and the DM want from their campaigns. I ran a campaign for three years that had plenty of combat, complex stories with puzzles, romance, intrigue with solo sessions and everything in between. My players never complained because I ensured that I tailored my campaigns to what I know my players wanted from it. And the thing is, if a combat heavy campaign is what the players and the DM agree with and they are happy and having fun? I see nothing wrong with it.
*edit* The reason why I love DnD so much is the flexibility and the plethora of options that are available to play the game. DnD lets you play the game however you want and create stories and campaigns how you want it to be. For me, there isn't a right or wrong way to play. If a group wants to just hack and slash their way to glory? They can do that. If they just want to roleplay with no combat interactions? You can. If you want to play it like Splinter Cell with stealth missions and stories? You can :-)! And that's why I have loved this game since I started playing back in 86 and stuck with it till this day.
As I already asked: Why does every single member of a party have to fight when combat breaks out? Is there absolutely nothing else a wizard could possibly do? Is there no utility spell that might be utilized to continue doing whatever the party were doing before they were attacked? Is there some compelling reason the wizard simply cannot avoid the fray to instead move beyond the location in which the fight is taking place and make itself useful there? Making every class combat-ready is an awfully myopic approach to a game with which there are really no limits to the stories we can tell at our tables. If every time combat breaks out every single member of the party enters combat mode that is about as two-dimensional as storytelling can get.
This is not a story. This is a game. This is a game that considers combat to be the most mechanically important part of the game. It deals with it far more granularly than it does anything else, so it consumes an enormous percentage of play time.
If a player regularly does not get to participate in the most significant part of the game, that is a problem of the design. The low-mid-level AD&D wizard had very few utility spells to even use, because they had to spend all their memorized spells for combat-related ones, because that was where the game was, and they had nothing else to do.
EDIT: I'm curious to know if you reckon it is "bad" and that everyone else in an adventuring party is "a useless bozo" when it's the party's most charismatic getting the party out of trouble say? Is it "bad" and is everyone else "a useless bozo" when a member of a party does something during "downtime" that does not concern others? Does everyone else in the party have to hold the rogue's hand as he or she navigates through some business with a guild with which he or she has become affiliated? Why is it just combat in which everyone must play an active role? Must fight? You don't think this overemphasizes the role of combat in a game that is about so much more?
If you're playing out your social interactions at even ten percent the level of mechanical granularity as combat, D&D is the wrong game for you.
Also, combat is regularly a whole-party endeavor. The wizards should be able to participate because they are there. When somebody wanders off to do a thing, nobody else is there. It's also typically short. If there's a lengthy solo thing going on, one tends to arrange for a side session for that player, so you don't have a lengthy period where not everyone is playing. (IIRC that's was a common complaint about older cyberpunk games, where the decker would be doing a separate thing from the rest of the team, and it led to lots of downtime for other players.)
Roleplaying social situations usually involves the other players, even if they're not the ones making the roll. They're there, doing their thing in-character. Maybe they're helping. Maybe they're hurting, but they're active.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition. But even today not all games played are saturated with combat. It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure. When that is pretty much what you are saying 5E is really about.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
I have played in campaigns that stretched into aeons in which little to no all-out combat took place. Because they were more about intrigue et cetera. There were published adventure modules back in the day geared towards this type of game. You need to stop acting as if you speak for the game itself and know what it considers most important when what you really mean is you are one of those players who tires easily if there is no combat in any given session.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
Those who pioneered table-top role-playing games did so by taking what were just combat games—wargames—and asking themselves what are the stories of each and every one of these miniatures? Why can't they have lives? Histories? Personalities? Why cant they do things outside of their just fighting?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
I'm going to have to disagree here with the combat in ADnD part. Back in the day, there was just as much combat as there is here. At least with the people I played with. We ran literal dungeon crawls where we would be in combat for multiple sessions. This didn't take away from the story or roleplaying either. The DMs I played with were able to weave fascinating stories along with having a plethora of combat mixed into the campaign. And when we got into the high levels (15+), we still were out looking for gold, treasure and glory.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's all about what the players and the DM want from their campaigns. I ran a campaign for three years that had plenty of combat, complex stories with puzzles, romance, intrigue with solo sessions and everything in between. My players never complained because I ensured that I tailored my campaigns to what I know my players wanted from it. And the thing is, if a combat heavy campaign is what the players and the DM agree with and they are happy and having fun? I see nothing wrong with it.
I would agree that the right approach is to steer the game towards what the players and the DM want out of a game.
Frankly I could not care less if a table strictly ran combat. I remember one Friday night in what would have been the early to mid '80s when friends of mine and I gambled real coin and just pitted different monsters against one another for fun.
But what you are saying goes both ways.
Someone here insisting that D&D is a combat-oriented game and that those of us who play or run games with combat but where it isn't the main feature of the game because story and characterization take precedence or even play or run games without combat are playing "the wrong game"? This is the poster whose position is the antithesis of what you are saying. But it is me to whom you respond.
EDIT: A three-year 5E campaign in which I played that started around the beginning of the pandemic saw the DM house rule things here and there for a more old-school feel. Also to achieve this it would not be uncommon for a whole four- or five-hour session to see no combat. Combat would make an appearance every second session or so. His sandbox world and how we interacted with it and the emergent storytelling this brought about is what mattered. He additionally ran a Western Marches-style game in the same world and what happened in those sessions impacted our ongoing campaign and vice-versa. This was how the people I played with back in the day would typically play. it is how the pioneers of the hobby would play. Epic story. That involved combat. And some of that combat even the most epic moments of the story. But it was never seen among us as being at all necessary to keep the game fun and interesting. Is it the one right way to play the game? No. There is no one right way to play the game. But don't pretend because there are more rules about how to resolve combat than there are how to oversee a dukedom or school others in magic or run a guild that these things are "secondary" to fight scenes and "always" have been.
As I already asked: Why does every single member of a party have to fight when combat breaks out? Is there absolutely nothing else a wizard could possibly do? Is there no utility spell that might be utilized to continue doing whatever the party were doing before they were attacked? Is there some compelling reason the wizard simply cannot avoid the fray to instead move beyond the location in which the fight is taking place and make itself useful there? Making every class combat-ready is an awfully myopic approach to a game with which there are really no limits to the stories we can tell at our tables. If every time combat breaks out every single member of the party enters combat mode that is about as two-dimensional as storytelling can get.
This is not a story. This is a game. This is a game that considers combat to be the most mechanically important part of the game. It deals with it far more granularly than it does anything else, so it consumes an enormous percentage of play time.
If a player regularly does not get to participate in the most significant part of the game, that is a problem of the design. The low-mid-level AD&D wizard had very few utility spells to even use, because they had to spend all their memorized spells for combat-related ones, because that was where the game was, and they had nothing else to do.
EDIT: I'm curious to know if you reckon it is "bad" and that everyone else in an adventuring party is "a useless bozo" when it's the party's most charismatic getting the party out of trouble say? Is it "bad" and is everyone else "a useless bozo" when a member of a party does something during "downtime" that does not concern others? Does everyone else in the party have to hold the rogue's hand as he or she navigates through some business with a guild with which he or she has become affiliated? Why is it just combat in which everyone must play an active role? Must fight? You don't think this overemphasizes the role of combat in a game that is about so much more?
If you're playing out your social interactions at even ten percent the level of mechanical granularity as combat, D&D is the wrong game for you.
Also, combat is regularly a whole-party endeavor. The wizards should be able to participate because they are there. When somebody wanders off to do a thing, nobody else is there. It's also typically short. If there's a lengthy solo thing going on, one tends to arrange for a side session for that player, so you don't have a lengthy period where not everyone is playing. (IIRC that's was a common complaint about older cyberpunk games, where the decker would be doing a separate thing from the rest of the team, and it led to lots of downtime for other players.)
Roleplaying social situations usually involves the other players, even if they're not the ones making the roll. They're there, doing their thing in-character. Maybe they're helping. Maybe they're hurting, but they're active.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition. But even today not all games played are saturated with combat. It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure. When that is pretty much what you are saying 5E is really about.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
I have played in campaigns that stretched into aeons in which little to no all-out combat took place. Because they were more about intrigue et cetera. There were published adventure modules back in the day geared towards this type of game. You need to stop acting as if you speak for the game itself and know what it considers most important when what you really mean is you are one of those players who tires easily if there is no combat in any given session.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
Those who pioneered table-top role-playing games did so by taking what were just combat games—wargames—and asking themselves what are the stories of each and every one of these miniatures? Why can't they have lives? Histories? Personalities? Why cant they do things outside of their just fighting?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
I'm going to have to disagree here with the combat in ADnD part. Back in the day, there was just as much combat as there is here. At least with the people I played with. We ran literal dungeon crawls where we would be in combat for multiple sessions. This didn't take away from the story or roleplaying either. The DMs I played with were able to weave fascinating stories along with having a plethora of combat mixed into the campaign. And when we got into the high levels (15+), we still were out looking for gold, treasure and glory.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's all about what the players and the DM want from their campaigns. I ran a campaign for three years that had plenty of combat, complex stories with puzzles, romance, intrigue with solo sessions and everything in between. My players never complained because I ensured that I tailored my campaigns to what I know my players wanted from it. And the thing is, if a combat heavy campaign is what the players and the DM agree with and they are happy and having fun? I see nothing wrong with it.
I would agree that the right approach is to steer the game towards what the players and the DM want out of a game.
Frankly I could not care less if a table strictly ran combat. I remember one Friday night in what would have been the early to mid '80s when friends of mine and I gambled real coin and just pitted different monsters against one another for fun.
But what you are saying goes both ways.
Someone here insisting that D&D is a combat-oriented game and that those of us who play or run games with combat but where it isn't the main feature of the game because story and characterization take precedence or even play or run games without combat are playing "the wrong game"? This is the poster whose position is the antithesis of what you are saying. But it is me to whom you respond.
EDIT: A three-year 5E campaign in which I played that started around the beginning of the pandemic saw the DM house rule things here and there for a more old-school feel. Also to achieve this it would not be uncommon for a whole four- or five-hour session to see no combat. Combat would make an appearance every second session or so. His sandbox world and how we interacted with it and the emergent storytelling this brought about is what mattered. He additionally ran a Western Marches-style game in the same world and what happened in those sessions impacted our ongoing campaign and vice-versa. This was how the people I played with back in the day would typically play. Epic story. That involved combat. And some of that combat even the most epic moments of the story. But it was never seen among us as being at all necessary to keep the game fun and interesting.
I responded to you because I didn't agree with your premise that AD&D wasn't combat heavy back in the day. I just responded with my experince of what I saw and how we played back in the day that we did play combat heavy games, jsut like you say these young Thundercats do today lol. If I offended you with that, it wasn't intentional nor was I trying to call you out. But I do admit that I did miss this part of your reply: "But even today not all games played are saturated with combat." My bad.
And I don't believe that D&D is a primarily combat-oriented game. It can be if that's what the DM makes it. But it isn't the main point of the game.
As I already asked: Why does every single member of a party have to fight when combat breaks out? Is there absolutely nothing else a wizard could possibly do? Is there no utility spell that might be utilized to continue doing whatever the party were doing before they were attacked? Is there some compelling reason the wizard simply cannot avoid the fray to instead move beyond the location in which the fight is taking place and make itself useful there? Making every class combat-ready is an awfully myopic approach to a game with which there are really no limits to the stories we can tell at our tables. If every time combat breaks out every single member of the party enters combat mode that is about as two-dimensional as storytelling can get.
This is not a story. This is a game. This is a game that considers combat to be the most mechanically important part of the game. It deals with it far more granularly than it does anything else, so it consumes an enormous percentage of play time.
If a player regularly does not get to participate in the most significant part of the game, that is a problem of the design. The low-mid-level AD&D wizard had very few utility spells to even use, because they had to spend all their memorized spells for combat-related ones, because that was where the game was, and they had nothing else to do.
EDIT: I'm curious to know if you reckon it is "bad" and that everyone else in an adventuring party is "a useless bozo" when it's the party's most charismatic getting the party out of trouble say? Is it "bad" and is everyone else "a useless bozo" when a member of a party does something during "downtime" that does not concern others? Does everyone else in the party have to hold the rogue's hand as he or she navigates through some business with a guild with which he or she has become affiliated? Why is it just combat in which everyone must play an active role? Must fight? You don't think this overemphasizes the role of combat in a game that is about so much more?
If you're playing out your social interactions at even ten percent the level of mechanical granularity as combat, D&D is the wrong game for you.
Also, combat is regularly a whole-party endeavor. The wizards should be able to participate because they are there. When somebody wanders off to do a thing, nobody else is there. It's also typically short. If there's a lengthy solo thing going on, one tends to arrange for a side session for that player, so you don't have a lengthy period where not everyone is playing. (IIRC that's was a common complaint about older cyberpunk games, where the decker would be doing a separate thing from the rest of the team, and it led to lots of downtime for other players.)
Roleplaying social situations usually involves the other players, even if they're not the ones making the roll. They're there, doing their thing in-character. Maybe they're helping. Maybe they're hurting, but they're active.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition. But even today not all games played are saturated with combat. It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure. When that is pretty much what you are saying 5E is really about.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
I have played in campaigns that stretched into aeons in which little to no all-out combat took place. Because they were more about intrigue et cetera. There were published adventure modules back in the day geared towards this type of game. You need to stop acting as if you speak for the game itself and know what it considers most important when what you really mean is you are one of those players who tires easily if there is no combat in any given session.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
Those who pioneered table-top role-playing games did so by taking what were just combat games—wargames—and asking themselves what are the stories of each and every one of these miniatures? Why can't they have lives? Histories? Personalities? Why cant they do things outside of their just fighting?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
I'm going to have to disagree here with the combat in ADnD part. Back in the day, there was just as much combat as there is here. At least with the people I played with. We ran literal dungeon crawls where we would be in combat for multiple sessions. This didn't take away from the story or roleplaying either. The DMs I played with were able to weave fascinating stories along with having a plethora of combat mixed into the campaign. And when we got into the high levels (15+), we still were out looking for gold, treasure and glory.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's all about what the players and the DM want from their campaigns. I ran a campaign for three years that had plenty of combat, complex stories with puzzles, romance, intrigue with solo sessions and everything in between. My players never complained because I ensured that I tailored my campaigns to what I know my players wanted from it. And the thing is, if a combat heavy campaign is what the players and the DM agree with and they are happy and having fun? I see nothing wrong with it.
I would agree that the right approach is to steer the game towards what the players and the DM want out of a game.
Frankly I could not care less if a table strictly ran combat. I remember one Friday night in what would have been the early to mid '80s when friends of mine and I gambled real coin and just pitted different monsters against one another for fun.
But what you are saying goes both ways.
Someone here insisting that D&D is a combat-oriented game and that those of us who play or run games with combat but where it isn't the main feature of the game because story and characterization take precedence or even play or run games without combat are playing "the wrong game"? This is the poster whose position is the antithesis of what you are saying. But it is me to whom you respond.
EDIT: A three-year 5E campaign in which I played that started around the beginning of the pandemic saw the DM house rule things here and there for a more old-school feel. Also to achieve this it would not be uncommon for a whole four- or five-hour session to see no combat. Combat would make an appearance every second session or so. His sandbox world and how we interacted with it and the emergent storytelling this brought about is what mattered. He additionally ran a Western Marches-style game in the same world and what happened in those sessions impacted our ongoing campaign and vice-versa. This was how the people I played with back in the day would typically play. Epic story. That involved combat. And some of that combat even the most epic moments of the story. But it was never seen among us as being at all necessary to keep the game fun and interesting.
I responded to you because I didn't agree with your premise that AD&D wasn't combat heavy back in the day. I just responded with my experince of what I saw and how we played back in the day that we did play combat heavy games, jsut like you say these young Thundercats do today lol. If I offended you with that, it wasn't intentional nor was I trying to call you out. But I do admit that I did miss this part of your reply: "But even today not all games played are saturated with combat." My bad.
And I don't believe that D&D is a primarily combat-oriented game. It can be if that's what the DM makes it. But it isn't the main point of the game.
Got it. And no offense taken.
Combat is—or rather can be—fun. I ain't going to judge tables who crave combat in their games and run more combat-heavy games. They're having fun. And that's really what it's all about. I would imagine however many players craving it while many DMs are trying to make their games about so much more given the time and effort many put into their settings and into the NPCs who populate them is one of a number of reasons the hobby is facing a DM shortage. Who hasn't seen in a game a situation in which a player just wants to start a fight during some encounter in which combat could be avoided because the player has grown bored because the player isn't at all interested in much of anything but combat? Sits staring at his or her phone and not paying all that much attention to what is going on until a fight has broken out? Short of that player being in one of those combat-heavy games and this being accommodated that is what we call a perfect example of a problem player. I guess the solution there is making sure we find tables conducive to our preferred style of play.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition.
It's not new, nor is it something that has gotten more pronounced over the years. The whole concept of original D&D was that the PCs were assaulting a dungeon (hence the name, and the title of 'dungeon master'). They had discretion about how they went about it, but the vast majority of options involved combat. Sure, actual campaigns could have plenty of roleplaying, but it wasn't particularly mechanically supported by the game system, nor was it a focus of published adventures (Keep on the Borderlands doesn't even bother to give NPCs names).
Now, later editions do have a greater focus on set-piece fights and splitting the monsters into distinct encounters (the Caves of Chaos had extensive notes on monsters running for reinforcements) but it's historical revisionism to think that original D&D wasn't focused on combat.
As I already asked: Why does every single member of a party have to fight when combat breaks out? Is there absolutely nothing else a wizard could possibly do? Is there no utility spell that might be utilized to continue doing whatever the party were doing before they were attacked? Is there some compelling reason the wizard simply cannot avoid the fray to instead move beyond the location in which the fight is taking place and make itself useful there? Making every class combat-ready is an awfully myopic approach to a game with which there are really no limits to the stories we can tell at our tables. If every time combat breaks out every single member of the party enters combat mode that is about as two-dimensional as storytelling can get.
This is not a story. This is a game. This is a game that considers combat to be the most mechanically important part of the game. It deals with it far more granularly than it does anything else, so it consumes an enormous percentage of play time.
If a player regularly does not get to participate in the most significant part of the game, that is a problem of the design. The low-mid-level AD&D wizard had very few utility spells to even use, because they had to spend all their memorized spells for combat-related ones, because that was where the game was, and they had nothing else to do.
EDIT: I'm curious to know if you reckon it is "bad" and that everyone else in an adventuring party is "a useless bozo" when it's the party's most charismatic getting the party out of trouble say? Is it "bad" and is everyone else "a useless bozo" when a member of a party does something during "downtime" that does not concern others? Does everyone else in the party have to hold the rogue's hand as he or she navigates through some business with a guild with which he or she has become affiliated? Why is it just combat in which everyone must play an active role? Must fight? You don't think this overemphasizes the role of combat in a game that is about so much more?
If you're playing out your social interactions at even ten percent the level of mechanical granularity as combat, D&D is the wrong game for you.
Also, combat is regularly a whole-party endeavor. The wizards should be able to participate because they are there. When somebody wanders off to do a thing, nobody else is there. It's also typically short. If there's a lengthy solo thing going on, one tends to arrange for a side session for that player, so you don't have a lengthy period where not everyone is playing. (IIRC that's was a common complaint about older cyberpunk games, where the decker would be doing a separate thing from the rest of the team, and it led to lots of downtime for other players.)
Roleplaying social situations usually involves the other players, even if they're not the ones making the roll. They're there, doing their thing in-character. Maybe they're helping. Maybe they're hurting, but they're active.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition. But even today not all games played are saturated with combat. It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure. When that is pretty much what you are saying 5E is really about.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
I have played in campaigns that stretched into aeons in which little to no all-out combat took place. Because they were more about intrigue et cetera. There were published adventure modules back in the day geared towards this type of game. You need to stop acting as if you speak for the game itself and know what it considers most important when what you really mean is you are one of those players who tires easily if there is no combat in any given session.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
Those who pioneered table-top role-playing games did so by taking what were just combat games—wargames—and asking themselves what are the stories of each and every one of these miniatures? Why can't they have lives? Histories? Personalities? Why cant they do things outside of their just fighting?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
I'm going to have to disagree here with the combat in ADnD part. Back in the day, there was just as much combat as there is here. At least with the people I played with. We ran literal dungeon crawls where we would be in combat for multiple sessions. This didn't take away from the story or roleplaying either. The DMs I played with were able to weave fascinating stories along with having a plethora of combat mixed into the campaign. And when we got into the high levels (15+), we still were out looking for gold, treasure and glory.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's all about what the players and the DM want from their campaigns. I ran a campaign for three years that had plenty of combat, complex stories with puzzles, romance, intrigue with solo sessions and everything in between. My players never complained because I ensured that I tailored my campaigns to what I know my players wanted from it. And the thing is, if a combat heavy campaign is what the players and the DM agree with and they are happy and having fun? I see nothing wrong with it.
I would agree that the right approach is to steer the game towards what the players and the DM want out of a game.
Frankly I could not care less if a table strictly ran combat. I remember one Friday night in what would have been the early to mid '80s when friends of mine and I gambled real coin and just pitted different monsters against one another for fun.
But what you are saying goes both ways.
Someone here insisting that D&D is a combat-oriented game and that those of us who play or run games with combat but where it isn't the main feature of the game because story and characterization take precedence or even play or run games without combat are playing "the wrong game"? This is the poster whose position is the antithesis of what you are saying. But it is me to whom you respond.
EDIT: A three-year 5E campaign in which I played that started around the beginning of the pandemic saw the DM house rule things here and there for a more old-school feel. Also to achieve this it would not be uncommon for a whole four- or five-hour session to see no combat. Combat would make an appearance every second session or so. His sandbox world and how we interacted with it and the emergent storytelling this brought about is what mattered. He additionally ran a Western Marches-style game in the same world and what happened in those sessions impacted our ongoing campaign and vice-versa. This was how the people I played with back in the day would typically play. Epic story. That involved combat. And some of that combat even the most epic moments of the story. But it was never seen among us as being at all necessary to keep the game fun and interesting.
I responded to you because I didn't agree with your premise that AD&D wasn't combat heavy back in the day. I just responded with my experince of what I saw and how we played back in the day that we did play combat heavy games, jsut like you say these young Thundercats do today lol. If I offended you with that, it wasn't intentional nor was I trying to call you out. But I do admit that I did miss this part of your reply: "But even today not all games played are saturated with combat." My bad.
And I don't believe that D&D is a primarily combat-oriented game. It can be if that's what the DM makes it. But it isn't the main point of the game.
Got it. And no offense taken.
Combat is—or rather can be—fun. I ain't going to judge tables who crave combat in their games and run more combat-heavy games. They're having fun. And that's really what it's all about. I would imagine however many players craving it while many DMs are trying to make their games about so much more given the time and effort many put into their settings and into the NPCs who populate them is one of a number of reasons the hobby is facing a DM shortage. Who hasn't seen in a game a situation in which a player just wants to start a fight during some encounter in which combat could be avoided because the player has grown bored because the player isn't at all interested in much of anything but combat? Sits staring at his or her phone and not paying all that much attention to what is going on until a fight has broken out? Short of that player being in one of those combat-heavy games and this being accommodated that is what we call a perfect example of a problem player. I guess the solution there is making sure we find tables conducive to our preferred style of play.
I understand what you are saying. I have seen it for myself plenty of times. Even as recently as the Journey to Ragnarok campaign I mentioned earlier in the post. The person was new to D&D, but was anxious about the roleplaying aspect of it because they are an introvert and was afraid of making a mistake. We tried to be as accomodating as we could and she did try to make the effort. But she wasn't really interested until the combat came. When she went through her first combat scenario, she loved it and that's all she was interested in afterwards. Some people are jsut like that sometimes. She actually ended up dropping from the campaign cause she was bored from all the roleplaying we were doing. But I can understand how she feels. Some days that's all I want to do is just go through and wreck shop for the session lol. But I also agree with what you said about the DM putting in all that effort just for someone not to appreciate it. It's frustrating and disheartening.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition.
It's not new, nor is it something that has gotten more pronounced over the years. The whole concept of original D&D was that the PCs were assaulting a dungeon (hence the name, and the title of 'dungeon master'). They had discretion about how they went about it, but the vast majority of options involved combat. Sure, actual campaigns could have plenty of roleplaying, but it wasn't particularly mechanically supported by the game system, nor was it a focus of published adventures (Keep on the Borderlands doesn't even bother to give NPCs names).
Now, later editions do have a greater focus on set-piece fights and splitting the monsters into distinct encounters (the Caves of Chaos had extensive notes on monsters running for reinforcements) but it's historical revisionism to think that original D&D wasn't focused on combat.
The pioneers of the hobby themselves—Gygax and Arneson—played in campaigns that stretched over years in which the characters and their stories and their interactions with the campaign worlds in which they played and with those in them were front and center. With combat just something that happened from time to time and that was a part of that story. They ran Western Marches-style campaigns that were more about the worlds and those in them and how these evolved than they were about mere fighting. The only historical revision going on is yours.
EDIT: OD&D came with supplements for entire campaign settings. The idea that it was just about "assaulting a dungeon" is laughable. Do you honestly believe the purpose of the game is reducible to its name?
And again this is funny: Because this is the charge leveled against so many rules-light games. They "can't" do anything but dungeon crawling!
Many TSR and Judges Guild supplements were focused on that immersion in a world. Were rich in detail about these worlds and those in them. What the rules facilitated is beside the point. The very beginnings of the hobby were about moving away from wargames that were purely combat games and aiming for emergent storytelling in fictional worlds.
Your emphasis on what the rules cover is ignoring how old-school D&D was more rulings not rules. The rules were there for the referee. To inform decisions that he or she would make. But many if not even most things that would happen were—and probably even remain so at most tables—independent of the rules.
The very moment that roleplaying games as we now know them were born is arguably the moment Arneson thought to himself what if these Napoleonic soldiers had names and lives and could do things for which there were no rules? If it wasn't just about fighting. Let's add a referee to adjudicate these sorts of things. That is what made a roleplaying game a roleplaying game. Now you want to pretend all else is secondary to the very thing Arneson sought to make secondary.
I own shelves' worth of old D&D and AD&D resources. No matter how many pages are given to how combat is resolved in the Player's Handbook it does not compare to the pages dedicated to world-building and NPCs who aren't just bags of HP not to mention the worlds of our own we have crafted and the stories we have woven in them.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition.
It's not new, nor is it something that has gotten more pronounced over the years. The whole concept of original D&D was that the PCs were assaulting a dungeon (hence the name, and the title of 'dungeon master'). They had discretion about how they went about it, but the vast majority of options involved combat. Sure, actual campaigns could have plenty of roleplaying, but it wasn't particularly mechanically supported by the game system, nor was it a focus of published adventures (Keep on the Borderlands doesn't even bother to give NPCs names).
Now, later editions do have a greater focus on set-piece fights and splitting the monsters into distinct encounters (the Caves of Chaos had extensive notes on monsters running for reinforcements) but it's historical revisionism to think that original D&D wasn't focused on combat.
D&D is, after all, originally derived from a war game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition.
It's not new, nor is it something that has gotten more pronounced over the years. The whole concept of original D&D was that the PCs were assaulting a dungeon (hence the name, and the title of 'dungeon master'). They had discretion about how they went about it, but the vast majority of options involved combat. Sure, actual campaigns could have plenty of roleplaying, but it wasn't particularly mechanically supported by the game system, nor was it a focus of published adventures (Keep on the Borderlands doesn't even bother to give NPCs names).
Now, later editions do have a greater focus on set-piece fights and splitting the monsters into distinct encounters (the Caves of Chaos had extensive notes on monsters running for reinforcements) but it's historical revisionism to think that original D&D wasn't focused on combat.
D&D is, after all, originally derived from a war game.
Correction: it was derived from taking a wargame and imagining if all those miniatures had names and lives and stories to tell. And adding a referee to adjudicate what the combat rules did not facilitate.
You can read academic histories of the hobby—not to mention see how Gygax and Arneson played—that make fairly clear the game was about getting beyond just combat and being more about emergent storytelling in fictional worlds.
Combat has been a part of most games. It's fun and can serve as a great storytelling device itself. But it is neither necessary nor what is most important. To some tables perhaps. Not to all. Are you telling me a group consisting of people who are big fans of the fiction of this or that fantasy author using D&D to play a game with greater emphasis on roleplaying and character interaction are playing "the wrong game"? Because people have been using the D&D system to run games in all manner of worlds and to achieve all manner of things for fifty years. If you need to be reminded.
EDIT: Let's say a group of players prefer the romantic fantasy of authors like Mercedes Lackey than they do that of authors whose works are filled with violence. Now while this group of let's say women more into romantic fantasy than what your idea of fantasy is could find a game whose rules or lack of them might be more conducive to this type of game what would you call players who told them to go away and play something else because D&D has "always mostly been about the fighting"? Sounds awfully gatekeeper-y to me.
Easy fix: get rid of having casters having to make attack rolls or their targets having to make saves. You roll to cast and it works or it doesn't.
Static target numbers that don't depend on the traits of the target are bad, and if you are making the TN depend on target traits... it's an attack roll.
You have a tendency to use the word "bad" as if you are the grand arbiter of what is good in good design.
He's not wrong. In the context of a game where bonuses scale upwards, a constant target number either becomes trivial, or starts out insurmountable. Both are bad design. A non-scaling fixed failure chance with bad consequences for basic powers is also not so hot.
Having never played shadowdark, I cannot speak as to its implementation, but shoehorned into 5e, it would be bad.
Like you expect us to just lose memories of having played D&D at a time when casters had fewer spells and would run out of them—You know? Like they did in the Vance novels that once inspired how magic worked in the game?—and insist those experiences must have been "bad." For everyone.
I do not rule out the possibility that you enjoyed it, but for the majority of players, it sucked. The badness of low-level wizards was oft explained as a balancing factor for them being so great later, but that excuse is a crock. It just means the design was bad at both ends.
ShadowDark took home four ENNIEs including the one for best rules. The praise and promotion the game has received is practically unprecedented among games not called D&D. But we are supposed to believe how it handles magic is "bad" ... because you say so?
You keep harping on this, and four ENNIEs is so unprecedented that it last happened in 2023 if I read correctly. Three awards seems pretty much a given for anything winning the bigger categories. Five has happened as well. The ENNIEs have a lot of categories, with significant overlap. ("Best game", "best rules", "product of the year", for instance.)
Is shadowdark good at achieving what it sets out to do? Maybe; I cannot opine. Is it popular in your circles? Certainly seems so, but I'd've likely never heard of it if not for 2-3 of you harping on about it. Is it taking the world of tabletop RPGs by storm? Can't say it has been.
Does any of this mean D&D should be more like shadowdark? No.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades
Assuming I recall you mentioning your start date correctly, longer than you.
—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd.
A system's purpose is what it does. A game's players will focus on engaging with the mechanics that are provided. D&D has always, first and foremost, provided combat mechanics. Third edition was the point at which they started providing real mechanics for anything else. People have always done more on the edges, but the core loop of old D&D for most people was "go into dungeon, fight monsters, find treasure". They even encouraged wandering monster tables to make sure your dungeon crawl was regularly punctuated with combat.
It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure.
Say what? This literally describes no rules-light game I'm aware of, except probably Dungeon World. But then, I already knew we existed in entirely different RPG spheres.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
Yes.
I am aware that it was a thing that was mentioned in 1e. I do not recall there being any meaningful support for a GM to make it happen and make it interesting. I expect most high-level play that engaged with it at all went something like "Fast forward Now there's an evil enemy threatening your domains.Time to go and stop it." Same basic game, but more epic in scope.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
D&D has, over the generations, become less and less about the archetypal dungeon crawl, and more about story. Did Keep on the Borderlands have a story of note? Tomb of Horrors? Expedition to the Barrier Peaks?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
Because I'm not the straw man you think I am? That I acknowledge that D&D is a game designed first for combat does not mean that I prefer it to other parts of the experience, much less that it's all I care about.
EDIT: I remember when 3rd. Edition first dropped. It was the first of the editions to assume combat would be resolved using miniatures and this not just being something that might be done but that was entirely unnecessary given theatre of the mind would suffice.
Given its direct descent from Chainmail, I find myself skeptical that 3e was the first time that assumption was made, if it even was. (4e certainly assumed miniatures, but 4e was a radical break with what had come before.)
The pioneers of the hobby themselves—Gygax and Arneson—played in campaigns that stretched over years in which the characters and their stories and their interactions with the campaign worlds in which they played and with those in them were front and center.
Which is entirely irrelevant as long as it wasn't published.
EDIT: OD&D came with supplements for entire campaign settings. The idea that it was just about "assaulting a dungeon" is laughable.
D&D was first published in 1974; AD&D was first published in 1977. The first dedicated setting books were published in 1987. Sure, a name can be deceptive... but for early D&D, it wasn't.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with combat-light or combat-free D&D. However, I don't think that's playing to the system's strengths. There are other games that do combatless or narrative/exploration/intrigue/social-heavy far better.
Easy fix: get rid of having casters having to make attack rolls or their targets having to make saves. You roll to cast and it works or it doesn't.
Static target numbers that don't depend on the traits of the target are bad, and if you are making the TN depend on target traits... it's an attack roll.
You have a tendency to use the word "bad" as if you are the grand arbiter of what is good in good design.
He's not wrong. In the context of a game where bonuses scale upwards, a constant target number either becomes trivial, or starts out insurmountable. Both are bad design. A non-scaling fixed failure chance with bad consequences for basic powers is also not so hot.
Having never played shadowdark, I cannot speak as to its implementation, but shoehorned into 5e, it would be bad.
Like you expect us to just lose memories of having played D&D at a time when casters had fewer spells and would run out of them—You know? Like they did in the Vance novels that once inspired how magic worked in the game?—and insist those experiences must have been "bad." For everyone.
I do not rule out the possibility that you enjoyed it, but for the majority of players, it sucked. The badness of low-level wizards was oft explained as a balancing factor for them being so great later, but that excuse is a crock. It just means the design was bad at both ends.
ShadowDark took home four ENNIEs including the one for best rules. The praise and promotion the game has received is practically unprecedented among games not called D&D. But we are supposed to believe how it handles magic is "bad" ... because you say so?
You keep harping on this, and four ENNIEs is so unprecedented that it last happened in 2023 if I read correctly. Three awards seems pretty much a given for anything winning the bigger categories. Five has happened as well. The ENNIEs have a lot of categories, with significant overlap. ("Best game", "best rules", "product of the year", for instance.)
Is shadowdark good at achieving what it sets out to do? Maybe; I cannot opine. Is it popular in your circles? Certainly seems so, but I'd've likely never heard of it if not for 2-3 of you harping on about it. Is it taking the world of tabletop RPGs by storm? Can't say it has been.
Does any of this mean D&D should be more like shadowdark? No.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades
Assuming I recall you mentioning your start date correctly, longer than you.
—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd.
A system's purpose is what it does. A game's players will focus on engaging with the mechanics that are provided. D&D has always, first and foremost, provided combat mechanics. Third edition was the point at which they started providing real mechanics for anything else. People have always done more on the edges, but the core loop of old D&D for most people was "go into dungeon, fight monsters, find treasure". They even encouraged wandering monster tables to make sure your dungeon crawl was regularly punctuated with combat.
It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure.
Say what? This literally describes no rules-light game I'm aware of, except probably Dungeon World. But then, I already knew we existed in entirely different RPG spheres.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
Yes.
I am aware that it was a thing that was mentioned in 1e. I do not recall there being any meaningful support for a GM to make it happen and make it interesting. I expect most high-level play that engaged with it at all went something like "Fast forward Now there's an evil enemy threatening your domains.Time to go and stop it." Same basic game, but more epic in scope.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
D&D has, over the generations, become less and less about the archetypal dungeon crawl, and more about story. Did Keep on the Borderlands have a story of note? Tomb of Horrors? Expedition to the Barrier Peaks?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
Because I'm not the straw man you think I am? That I acknowledge that D&D is a game designed first for combat does not mean that I prefer it to other parts of the experience, much less that it's all I care about.
EDIT: I remember when 3rd. Edition first dropped. It was the first of the editions to assume combat would be resolved using miniatures and this not just being something that might be done but that was entirely unnecessary given theatre of the mind would suffice.
Given its direct descent from Chainmail, I find myself skeptical that 3e was the first time that assumption was made, if it even was. (4e certainly assumed miniatures, but 4e was a radical break with what had come before.)
I was not merely talking about the ENNIEs ShadowDark got: You even quoted me talking about the praise and promotion it has received. By which I mean prominent YouTubers in the hobby and so on. Just because you might now exist and play in a 5E bubble does not mean the rest of us have to.
You have been playing for more than 41 years but you believe all those supplements for campaign settings rich in detail and in their descriptions of NPCs et cetera et cetera and all those Western Marches-style campaigns that saw their worlds evolve with every session means combat has really always been the true focus of the game?
Not the emergent storytelling in fictional worlds that—you know—defines what a roleplaying game is according to even those who have studied the history of the hobby like Jon Peterson.
I have never played Dungeon World. Many games—in fact just about any OSR game including Old School Essentials despite its essentially being Moldvay/Cook and that ruleset being more than capable of handling things beyond dungeon crawling and older OSR games like Swords & Wizardry and and newer ones like Knave and Into the Odd and even now ShadowDark—get accused of being just for dungeon crawling. They might be more conducive to this provided their rules. But no more than D&D. So yes it would seem you are in that bubble if you are truly oblivious to this.
Did you never own anything from Judges Guild? You have never picked up over all those years of gaming anything by them? How about by others producing game content for OD&D and AD&D? Anything by Gabor Lux or others today producing the sorts of resources Judges Guild and TSR once produced that you seem to be of the mind never were? Look at 2nd. Edition and what we got with Planescape alone. Not just a boxed campaign setting. Boxed sets for different planes et cetera et cetera.
Domain-level play with players managing guilds and kingdoms and so on was supported. And these were things we would roleplay in extensive campaigns. You don't just get to erase people's experiences by pretending how you might play D&D is how everyone plays D&D.
Let me ask you what I asked someone else:
Let's say a group of players prefer the romantic fantasy of authors like Mercedes Lackey than they do that of authors whose works are filled with violence. Now while this group of let's say women more into romantic fantasy than what your idea of fantasy is could find a game whose rules or lack of them might be more conducive to this type of game what would you call players who told them to go away and play something else because D&D has "always mostly been about the fighting"? Sounds awfully gatekeeper-y to me.
Given its direct descent from Chainmail, I find myself skeptical that 3e was the first time that assumption was made, if it even was. (4e certainly assumed miniatures, but 4e was a radical break with what had come before.)
You said you have been playing for over 41 years. But now you are leaning on skepticism and apparently just not knowing how earlier editions you would have been playing yourself made pretty clear miniatures might be used but that theater of the mind suffices?
Arneson conceived of the idea of a roleplaying game as we know it by doing two things:
(1) adding a referee to adjudicate those things combat rules would did not cover;
(2) doing this to create a game that was more about emergent storytelling in fictional worlds than just simulating combat.
The pioneers of the hobby themselves—Gygax and Arneson—played in campaigns that stretched over years in which the characters and their stories and their interactions with the campaign worlds in which they played and with those in them were front and center.
Which is entirely irrelevant as long as it wasn't published.
EDIT: OD&D came with supplements for entire campaign settings. The idea that it was just about "assaulting a dungeon" is laughable.
D&D was first published in 1974; AD&D was first published in 1977. The first dedicated setting books were published in 1987. Sure, a name can be deceptive... but for early D&D, it wasn't.
OD&D had supplements for both Blackmoor (Arneson's campaign world) and Greyhawk (Gygax's campaign world). So now you are just making things up.
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This is not a story. This is a game. This is a game that considers combat to be the most mechanically important part of the game. It deals with it far more granularly than it does anything else, so it consumes an enormous percentage of play time.
If a player regularly does not get to participate in the most significant part of the game, that is a problem of the design. The low-mid-level AD&D wizard had very few utility spells to even use, because they had to spend all their memorized spells for combat-related ones, because that was where the game was, and they had nothing else to do.
If you're playing out your social interactions at even ten percent the level of mechanical granularity as combat, D&D is the wrong game for you.
Also, combat is regularly a whole-party endeavor. The wizards should be able to participate because they are there. When somebody wanders off to do a thing, nobody else is there. It's also typically short. If there's a lengthy solo thing going on, one tends to arrange for a side session for that player, so you don't have a lengthy period where not everyone is playing. (IIRC that's was a common complaint about older cyberpunk games, where the decker would be doing a separate thing from the rest of the team, and it led to lots of downtime for other players.)
Roleplaying social situations usually involves the other players, even if they're not the ones making the roll. They're there, doing their thing in-character. Maybe they're helping. Maybe they're hurting, but they're active.
Easy fix: get rid of having casters having to make attack rolls or their targets having to make saves. You roll to cast and it works or it doesn't.
That is how ShadowDark handles spellcasting. The caster does not additionally have to make an attack roll and targets do not additionally have to make saves.
This streamlines spellcasting.
One of the beautiful things about 5E is the simplicity of its core mechanic. You want to do something. You are given a target number. You roll a d20. Add or subtract any modifiers. Meet or beat that target number. Done.
Were all spells handled as simply as requesting the caster make a roll it would be simpler. Expecting particularly new players to remember which spells require an attack roll and which ones require saves be made when wizards these days have more spells than necessary unnecessarily complicates things. I have been playing and running D&D for 41 years. And I laugh when people talk about all the unnecessary rules in AD&D. Because I had no trouble then remembering everything to be remembered about one of my players' characters without consulting the rules. Fewer spells that would be in a character's arsenal. Now there is constant page-turning to be reminded how any one spell might work in that regard. Even other DMs I know and with whom I have played have found this to be the case. Constant page-turning at their tables. Or constantly having to look up this or that spell online.
You yourself admit a spell already has a chance of failure. If an attack roll or save is needed. Why not eliminate that and just replace it with something simpler?
Static target numbers that don't depend on the traits of the target are bad, and if you are making the TN depend on target traits... it's an attack roll.
I cannot know how new to D&D you are—for all I know you have been playing for decades—but this idea that the game is mostly about fighting is a new phenomenon as that was simply not the case prior to 3rd. Edition. But even today not all games played are saturated with combat. It's funny that one of the criticisms leveled against so many rules-light games is that they just don't have the rules to allow for much more than fighting monsters and obtaining treasure. When that is pretty much what you are saying 5E is really about.
Are you forgetting my having mentioned domain-level play and how this used to be given greater attention? What do you think most gaming groups playing AD&D did back in the day with their high-level campaigns? Do you think they just went on fighting things for gold and glory?
I have played in campaigns that stretched into aeons in which little to no all-out combat took place. Because they were more about intrigue et cetera. There were published adventure modules back in the day geared towards this type of game. You need to stop acting as if you speak for the game itself and know what it considers most important when what you really mean is you are one of those players who tires easily if there is no combat in any given session.
The more and more the game has become a combat game—which we first saw with the advent of the 3rd. Edition—with barely a story stringing together combat sequences like in the worst of MCU movies the less and less it has been about story. But you suggesting it is not as if it has never been about telling a story is laughable:
Those who pioneered table-top role-playing games did so by taking what were just combat games—wargames—and asking themselves what are the stories of each and every one of these miniatures? Why can't they have lives? Histories? Personalities? Why cant they do things outside of their just fighting?
If you love combat so much and don't care for story why not just roll up characters and stage tournaments between them and monsters?
EDIT: I remember when 3rd. Edition first dropped. It was the first of the editions to assume combat would be resolved using miniatures and this not just being something that might be done but that was entirely unnecessary given theatre of the mind would suffice. The language used to describe combat was more wargame-y. Instead of more abstract. I remember well at the time how many said Wizards were turning D&D into a wargame. A combat simulation game. How this broke with the spirit of the game as an exercise in theater of the mind and one that could be of emergent storytelling when things like sandboxes were used and not just linear and scripted adventures. The idea that combat is oh-so-important to the game and that a game of D&D is not or never has been more about weaving a story is preposterous.
You have a tendency to use the word "bad" as if you are the grand arbiter of what is good in good design. Like you expect us to just lose memories of having played D&D at a time when casters had fewer spells and would run out of them—You know? Like they did in the Vance novels that once inspired how magic worked in the game?—and insist those experiences must have been "bad." For everyone.
ShadowDark took home four ENNIEs including the one for best rules. The praise and promotion the game has received is practically unprecedented among games not called D&D. But we are supposed to believe how it handles magic is "bad" ... because you say so?
I'm going to have to disagree here with the combat in ADnD part. Back in the day, there was just as much combat as there is here. At least with the people I played with. We ran literal dungeon crawls where we would be in combat for multiple sessions. This didn't take away from the story or roleplaying either. The DMs I played with were able to weave fascinating stories along with having a plethora of combat mixed into the campaign. And when we got into the high levels (15+), we still were out looking for gold, treasure and glory.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's all about what the players and the DM want from their campaigns. I ran a campaign for three years that had plenty of combat, complex stories with puzzles, romance, intrigue with solo sessions and everything in between. My players never complained because I ensured that I tailored my campaigns to what I know my players wanted from it. And the thing is, if a combat heavy campaign is what the players and the DM agree with and they are happy and having fun? I see nothing wrong with it.
*edit* The reason why I love DnD so much is the flexibility and the plethora of options that are available to play the game. DnD lets you play the game however you want and create stories and campaigns how you want it to be. For me, there isn't a right or wrong way to play. If a group wants to just hack and slash their way to glory? They can do that. If they just want to roleplay with no combat interactions? You can. If you want to play it like Splinter Cell with stealth missions and stories? You can :-)! And that's why I have loved this game since I started playing back in 86 and stuck with it till this day.
I would agree that the right approach is to steer the game towards what the players and the DM want out of a game.
Frankly I could not care less if a table strictly ran combat. I remember one Friday night in what would have been the early to mid '80s when friends of mine and I gambled real coin and just pitted different monsters against one another for fun.
But what you are saying goes both ways.
Someone here insisting that D&D is a combat-oriented game and that those of us who play or run games with combat but where it isn't the main feature of the game because story and characterization take precedence or even play or run games without combat are playing "the wrong game"? This is the poster whose position is the antithesis of what you are saying. But it is me to whom you respond.
EDIT: A three-year 5E campaign in which I played that started around the beginning of the pandemic saw the DM house rule things here and there for a more old-school feel. Also to achieve this it would not be uncommon for a whole four- or five-hour session to see no combat. Combat would make an appearance every second session or so. His sandbox world and how we interacted with it and the emergent storytelling this brought about is what mattered. He additionally ran a Western Marches-style game in the same world and what happened in those sessions impacted our ongoing campaign and vice-versa. This was how the people I played with back in the day would typically play. it is how the pioneers of the hobby would play. Epic story. That involved combat. And some of that combat even the most epic moments of the story. But it was never seen among us as being at all necessary to keep the game fun and interesting. Is it the one right way to play the game? No. There is no one right way to play the game. But don't pretend because there are more rules about how to resolve combat than there are how to oversee a dukedom or school others in magic or run a guild that these things are "secondary" to fight scenes and "always" have been.
I responded to you because I didn't agree with your premise that AD&D wasn't combat heavy back in the day. I just responded with my experince of what I saw and how we played back in the day that we did play combat heavy games, jsut like you say these young Thundercats do today lol. If I offended you with that, it wasn't intentional nor was I trying to call you out. But I do admit that I did miss this part of your reply: "But even today not all games played are saturated with combat." My bad.
And I don't believe that D&D is a primarily combat-oriented game. It can be if that's what the DM makes it. But it isn't the main point of the game.
Got it. And no offense taken.
Combat is—or rather can be—fun. I ain't going to judge tables who crave combat in their games and run more combat-heavy games. They're having fun. And that's really what it's all about. I would imagine however many players craving it while many DMs are trying to make their games about so much more given the time and effort many put into their settings and into the NPCs who populate them is one of a number of reasons the hobby is facing a DM shortage. Who hasn't seen in a game a situation in which a player just wants to start a fight during some encounter in which combat could be avoided because the player has grown bored because the player isn't at all interested in much of anything but combat? Sits staring at his or her phone and not paying all that much attention to what is going on until a fight has broken out? Short of that player being in one of those combat-heavy games and this being accommodated that is what we call a perfect example of a problem player. I guess the solution there is making sure we find tables conducive to our preferred style of play.
It's not new, nor is it something that has gotten more pronounced over the years. The whole concept of original D&D was that the PCs were assaulting a dungeon (hence the name, and the title of 'dungeon master'). They had discretion about how they went about it, but the vast majority of options involved combat. Sure, actual campaigns could have plenty of roleplaying, but it wasn't particularly mechanically supported by the game system, nor was it a focus of published adventures (Keep on the Borderlands doesn't even bother to give NPCs names).
Now, later editions do have a greater focus on set-piece fights and splitting the monsters into distinct encounters (the Caves of Chaos had extensive notes on monsters running for reinforcements) but it's historical revisionism to think that original D&D wasn't focused on combat.
I understand what you are saying. I have seen it for myself plenty of times. Even as recently as the Journey to Ragnarok campaign I mentioned earlier in the post. The person was new to D&D, but was anxious about the roleplaying aspect of it because they are an introvert and was afraid of making a mistake. We tried to be as accomodating as we could and she did try to make the effort. But she wasn't really interested until the combat came. When she went through her first combat scenario, she loved it and that's all she was interested in afterwards. Some people are jsut like that sometimes. She actually ended up dropping from the campaign cause she was bored from all the roleplaying we were doing. But I can understand how she feels. Some days that's all I want to do is just go through and wreck shop for the session lol. But I also agree with what you said about the DM putting in all that effort just for someone not to appreciate it. It's frustrating and disheartening.
The pioneers of the hobby themselves—Gygax and Arneson—played in campaigns that stretched over years in which the characters and their stories and their interactions with the campaign worlds in which they played and with those in them were front and center. With combat just something that happened from time to time and that was a part of that story. They ran Western Marches-style campaigns that were more about the worlds and those in them and how these evolved than they were about mere fighting. The only historical revision going on is yours.
EDIT: OD&D came with supplements for entire campaign settings. The idea that it was just about "assaulting a dungeon" is laughable. Do you honestly believe the purpose of the game is reducible to its name?
And again this is funny: Because this is the charge leveled against so many rules-light games. They "can't" do anything but dungeon crawling!
Many TSR and Judges Guild supplements were focused on that immersion in a world. Were rich in detail about these worlds and those in them. What the rules facilitated is beside the point. The very beginnings of the hobby were about moving away from wargames that were purely combat games and aiming for emergent storytelling in fictional worlds.
Your emphasis on what the rules cover is ignoring how old-school D&D was more rulings not rules. The rules were there for the referee. To inform decisions that he or she would make. But many if not even most things that would happen were—and probably even remain so at most tables—independent of the rules.
The very moment that roleplaying games as we now know them were born is arguably the moment Arneson thought to himself what if these Napoleonic soldiers had names and lives and could do things for which there were no rules? If it wasn't just about fighting. Let's add a referee to adjudicate these sorts of things. That is what made a roleplaying game a roleplaying game. Now you want to pretend all else is secondary to the very thing Arneson sought to make secondary.
I own shelves' worth of old D&D and AD&D resources. No matter how many pages are given to how combat is resolved in the Player's Handbook it does not compare to the pages dedicated to world-building and NPCs who aren't just bags of HP not to mention the worlds of our own we have crafted and the stories we have woven in them.
D&D is, after all, originally derived from a war game.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Correction: it was derived from taking a wargame and imagining if all those miniatures had names and lives and stories to tell. And adding a referee to adjudicate what the combat rules did not facilitate.
You can read academic histories of the hobby—not to mention see how Gygax and Arneson played—that make fairly clear the game was about getting beyond just combat and being more about emergent storytelling in fictional worlds.
Combat has been a part of most games. It's fun and can serve as a great storytelling device itself. But it is neither necessary nor what is most important. To some tables perhaps. Not to all. Are you telling me a group consisting of people who are big fans of the fiction of this or that fantasy author using D&D to play a game with greater emphasis on roleplaying and character interaction are playing "the wrong game"? Because people have been using the D&D system to run games in all manner of worlds and to achieve all manner of things for fifty years. If you need to be reminded.
EDIT: Let's say a group of players prefer the romantic fantasy of authors like Mercedes Lackey than they do that of authors whose works are filled with violence. Now while this group of let's say women more into romantic fantasy than what your idea of fantasy is could find a game whose rules or lack of them might be more conducive to this type of game what would you call players who told them to go away and play something else because D&D has "always mostly been about the fighting"? Sounds awfully gatekeeper-y to me.
He's not wrong. In the context of a game where bonuses scale upwards, a constant target number either becomes trivial, or starts out insurmountable. Both are bad design. A non-scaling fixed failure chance with bad consequences for basic powers is also not so hot.
Having never played shadowdark, I cannot speak as to its implementation, but shoehorned into 5e, it would be bad.
I do not rule out the possibility that you enjoyed it, but for the majority of players, it sucked. The badness of low-level wizards was oft explained as a balancing factor for them being so great later, but that excuse is a crock. It just means the design was bad at both ends.
You keep harping on this, and four ENNIEs is so unprecedented that it last happened in 2023 if I read correctly. Three awards seems pretty much a given for anything winning the bigger categories. Five has happened as well. The ENNIEs have a lot of categories, with significant overlap. ("Best game", "best rules", "product of the year", for instance.)
Is shadowdark good at achieving what it sets out to do? Maybe; I cannot opine. Is it popular in your circles? Certainly seems so, but I'd've likely never heard of it if not for 2-3 of you harping on about it. Is it taking the world of tabletop RPGs by storm? Can't say it has been.
Does any of this mean D&D should be more like shadowdark? No.
Assuming I recall you mentioning your start date correctly, longer than you.
A system's purpose is what it does. A game's players will focus on engaging with the mechanics that are provided. D&D has always, first and foremost, provided combat mechanics. Third edition was the point at which they started providing real mechanics for anything else. People have always done more on the edges, but the core loop of old D&D for most people was "go into dungeon, fight monsters, find treasure". They even encouraged wandering monster tables to make sure your dungeon crawl was regularly punctuated with combat.
Say what? This literally describes no rules-light game I'm aware of, except probably Dungeon World. But then, I already knew we existed in entirely different RPG spheres.
Yes.
I am aware that it was a thing that was mentioned in 1e. I do not recall there being any meaningful support for a GM to make it happen and make it interesting. I expect most high-level play that engaged with it at all went something like "Fast forward Now there's an evil enemy threatening your domains.Time to go and stop it." Same basic game, but more epic in scope.
D&D has, over the generations, become less and less about the archetypal dungeon crawl, and more about story. Did Keep on the Borderlands have a story of note? Tomb of Horrors? Expedition to the Barrier Peaks?
Because I'm not the straw man you think I am? That I acknowledge that D&D is a game designed first for combat does not mean that I prefer it to other parts of the experience, much less that it's all I care about.
Given its direct descent from Chainmail, I find myself skeptical that 3e was the first time that assumption was made, if it even was. (4e certainly assumed miniatures, but 4e was a radical break with what had come before.)
Which is entirely irrelevant as long as it wasn't published.
D&D was first published in 1974; AD&D was first published in 1977. The first dedicated setting books were published in 1987. Sure, a name can be deceptive... but for early D&D, it wasn't.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with combat-light or combat-free D&D. However, I don't think that's playing to the system's strengths. There are other games that do combatless or narrative/exploration/intrigue/social-heavy far better.
I was not merely talking about the ENNIEs ShadowDark got: You even quoted me talking about the praise and promotion it has received. By which I mean prominent YouTubers in the hobby and so on. Just because you might now exist and play in a 5E bubble does not mean the rest of us have to.
You have been playing for more than 41 years but you believe all those supplements for campaign settings rich in detail and in their descriptions of NPCs et cetera et cetera and all those Western Marches-style campaigns that saw their worlds evolve with every session means combat has really always been the true focus of the game?
Not the emergent storytelling in fictional worlds that—you know—defines what a roleplaying game is according to even those who have studied the history of the hobby like Jon Peterson.
I have never played Dungeon World. Many games—in fact just about any OSR game including Old School Essentials despite its essentially being Moldvay/Cook and that ruleset being more than capable of handling things beyond dungeon crawling and older OSR games like Swords & Wizardry and and newer ones like Knave and Into the Odd and even now ShadowDark—get accused of being just for dungeon crawling. They might be more conducive to this provided their rules. But no more than D&D. So yes it would seem you are in that bubble if you are truly oblivious to this.
Did you never own anything from Judges Guild? You have never picked up over all those years of gaming anything by them? How about by others producing game content for OD&D and AD&D? Anything by Gabor Lux or others today producing the sorts of resources Judges Guild and TSR once produced that you seem to be of the mind never were? Look at 2nd. Edition and what we got with Planescape alone. Not just a boxed campaign setting. Boxed sets for different planes et cetera et cetera.
Domain-level play with players managing guilds and kingdoms and so on was supported. And these were things we would roleplay in extensive campaigns. You don't just get to erase people's experiences by pretending how you might play D&D is how everyone plays D&D.
Let me ask you what I asked someone else:
Let's say a group of players prefer the romantic fantasy of authors like Mercedes Lackey than they do that of authors whose works are filled with violence. Now while this group of let's say women more into romantic fantasy than what your idea of fantasy is could find a game whose rules or lack of them might be more conducive to this type of game what would you call players who told them to go away and play something else because D&D has "always mostly been about the fighting"? Sounds awfully gatekeeper-y to me.
You said you have been playing for over 41 years. But now you are leaning on skepticism and apparently just not knowing how earlier editions you would have been playing yourself made pretty clear miniatures might be used but that theater of the mind suffices?
Arneson conceived of the idea of a roleplaying game as we know it by doing two things:
(1) adding a referee to adjudicate those things combat rules would did not cover;
(2) doing this to create a game that was more about emergent storytelling in fictional worlds than just simulating combat.
OD&D had supplements for both Blackmoor (Arneson's campaign world) and Greyhawk (Gygax's campaign world). So now you are just making things up.