If you stick around the modern RPG community online for any significant period of time, you will start to notice a disconnect between what people claim to want, and what they actually do. Here are some examples:
But the biggest one of all is this: they generally talk about how RPGs should be more than just combat, and yet they never really give any options for players to do things outside of combat, and all of their discussions of balance, story paths, etc. inevitably revolve around combat. It becomes realliy obvious in two situations. The first is when non-combat options are shot down. "Can I run sessions where my players just manage a kingdom?" No, that's boring. "Would having a PC party be a bunch of traveling merchants be a viable campaign?" No, that's not "heroic." "How should I roleplay the process of having our wizard make a magical item?" You shouldn't, just skip to the magical item being made so you can get back to the actual roleplaying. About the only thing that they allow that isn't combat is dialogues/monologues that are done through LARP style improv, or having players mess around in ways that has no impact on the story. The second place it becomes obvious is in discussions of balance. Suppose that you did make a merchant class which had many benefits relating to haggling, getting goods through suppliers, procuring rare items, etc. This type of character could have a dramatic impact on the world at large, and could be very valuable to a party in terms of supplying items and helping the party interact with others outside of the dungeon. But the inevitable question will be "how is a merchant going to pull his weight during combat?"
So this raises the question of why things are like this. If everyone views combat as just one small part of roleplaying, then why does combat dominate all discussions of roleplaying? There are a few reasons, some relatively innocuous. For exmaple, combat tends to be one of the more mechanically complicated scenarios. You will inevitably need more rules for a satisfying combat than to determine if a character can climb a wall, for example. So much of the rulebooks will get devoted to the topic, which then pushes players and GMs to care more about it as well. But this isn't the sole reason, as there are many other areas of roleplaying which necessarily can become mechanically complex. For example, chase or tracking rules. If you have some villains try to run from the players (or vice versa) it isn't very satisfying to simply have one check to see if the villains get away or if they are caught. You want some sort of multi-stage process where the pursuers can get closer or further from those fleeing, depending on their successes and failures (including movement speeds, tracking skills, tricks used by those running away, etc.) Yet chase rules are often ignored completely. Running a kingdom or a business is going to be mechanically complex, and it easily could be more so that combat. But in many campaigns this situation will never come up at all, and when it does it will often be done through a single skill check (ex. "roll for Profession (blacksmith.)") And indeed if we wanted to we could make combat similarly simple. Just give each side a combined "combat rating" and roll a single check to see who wins, with perhaps a better or worse roll leading to the winners becoming more or less wounded after the fact. So the complexity of combat in the rules is in many ways a symptom of the focus on combat, not the main cause.
Originally it's obvious why combat was a large focus: the players came from wargames where combat was literally the whole game, and they read sword and sorcery style fiction where combat always played a prominent role. However, now most people involved in RPGs have never played a wargame, and the type of fiction they read (if they read at all) is not as combat heavy. So their influences do not push them towards combat as much as in the past, and they claim to not care about combat as much as past generations, but it still is the be-all end-all. Now you could argue that this is just due to inertia, i.e. that combat has always been so important in RPGs that people who play RPGs will always get obsessed with combat. That's closer, but not quite it, since many other important mechanics were not carried along by inertia. For example in D&D strict timekeeping is stressed through 2nd edition, but basically disappears from 3rd edition onwards and modern RPG fans struggle to understand why strict timekeeping would be desirable in the first place. The same thing has happened with mass combat, domain level play, "off session" actions like training, dungeons that "restock," quick and random character generation, harsh death rules, etc. All of these things disappeared, but combat did not. Why?
The problem with combat is that if you removed it, you would not have role playing games. That is, combat is literally the only part of role playing games that everyone can agree is part of the game, and even then we're talking about combat of a six man party vs. a similar group of monsters or NPCs. If you say "my first level fighter wants to hire some men at arms and destroy some goblin patrols in medium scale skirmish" many people will chime in to tell you that this is not what RPGs should be about. It's too hard to keep track of that many people, it's cowardly for your fighter to hire others to assist him in batttle, we shouldn't have NPCs helping the party to that extent to begin with, etc. Similarly if you say "our party decided to strike out into the unexplored wilderness in search of valuable goods, or a place to create a stronghold" you will be told that this is not what RPGs are about. Obviously by doing that you are ignoring both the part of the world that your GM established, as well as the plot that he worked hard on, so it is disrespectful. And so on. The only thing where people will universally agree is appropriate in an RPG is having a small party get into combat.
This is why balance must necessarily be about small scale combat only. If you have a merchant who has bonuses to business transacations you'll get asked "but what if your campaign doesn't focus on business?" If you have a king who gets bonues to the stability of his kingdom you will get asked "but what if your campaign doesn't involve ruling over kingdoms?" If you have a pirate with bonuses to sailing and swimming you will get asked "but what if your campaign does not go to sea?" And obviously each of these classes would be much worse in a campaign where they can never do what they were designed to do. But if you say something like "I have a new class that is good at tanking damage in a fight" and everyone will agree that this could be a useful class.
Now it's not that people will just play fights over and over again in their RPG sessions. But what appears outside of combat will tend to be shallow. This happens due to the fact that the only reliable feature of an RPG is combat, so this what they prepare for, so they are unequipped to make non-combat roles interesting. Thus they are there just out of a sense of obligation. That is, we don't want a "hack and slash" game, so PCs should be able to do things like pick locks, barter, sneak into castles, scry to determine where someone is, etc. But each of these things only has rules support up to "you succeed" or "you fail" so there isn't much depth. Worse, these actions will often be the key to the storyline or to "let an individual player shine." For example, suppose that the party is not just use a scry spell because they decided to do so arbitrarily, but is using one to track down a villain that they are meant to fight in the adventure. If the spell fails, then the villain could get away and the adventure is over in an unsatisfying manner. So the GM will be greatly tempted to fudge the roll so that the scrying automatically succeeds, or alternatively if it fails he will be tempted to feed the party the same information in a different way (for example perhaps a minion defects and tells the party where his former boss is.) Either way the scrying doesn't have any weight as a game action, since it will not determine what the party can or can't do. It's just window dressing; it's a way for the GM to say "now you find the villain at this location" without it being completely unexplained in universe. This is different from combat scenarios, where the GM may have a victor planned, but the specifics of who gets hit, what resources are used, etc. are left up to player decisions and the dice. In other scenarios non-combat actions lead nowhere. For example, a thief may try to pickpocket passers-by on the street for some cash. But if the party is on a fixed plotline, then it is unlikely that he will get so much money from this that the party will be able to buy their way out of their dilemma, and if he fails it is unlikely that he will be caught by the authorities and thrown in jail, taking him out of the game. He simply may get an irrelevant amount of gold or face some angry, but easily dealt with, townsfolk. It's a mild distraction from the RPG before things get onto the "proper" course (i.e. following the set plotline and getting into combat.)
As this is the situation, trying to balance around non-combat becomes even more pointless. Players know that when they use a skill outside of combat one of three things will happen:
So having +5 to pick locks doesn't really matter. If your party needs to get through the door, your GM will fudge the roll (so you would still suceed even without the bonus) or you will be given another way to get through the door, at perhaps only a mild inconvenience. If your party isn't supposed to go through the door then the lock will be so well made that you cannot succeed (even if you are a master thief and this is a poor peasant's house.) If it's fine either way, then your roll might actually be done legitimately, but all you'll get from going through the door is maybe 10GP. So in any case there is very little that changes due to this skill bonus. But having more hit points, or being able to dish out more damage in combat, is guaranteed to have some relevance.
These examples hint at what is necessary to make the game interesting beyond combat: you need to play the dice as they roll, and you need to give the players autonomy. When you design the world they live in, you should try to design it independently of what makes the players succeed or fail. To take the lock-picking example, let's consider how things might work in 3rd edition. A DM might say "I know that my party has a rogue who has a +15 bonus to pick locks, after I consider skill ranks, ability bonuses, feats, etc. Here is a locked door that I want the party to go through, and I want the rogue to feel like he is helping out, so let's make the DC 30. Then he has a pretty decent chance to pick the lock even with a few rolls, and he will be guaranteed to get through by taking 20. However this door over here leads to an area I don't want the party going to, so I"ll make it locked with a DC 50 lock, and make the door to strong for the fighter to bash down and magic resistant." What would be better to do is to have some standards for what sort of security is used in certain places. When designing a dungeon you would choose specific DC ratings for specific doors, according to what type of lock would logically be there. But if the players go off track and start trying to break into shops or the like, you'd refer to a table. For example, a high class jewelry store is going to have better locks than a low class family. If a rogue attempts to get into one of these doors, simply use the appropriate DC and let the dice fall where they may. Then a +5 bonus to lock picking has a very real benefit in terms of which doors the rogue can now reasonably expect to get through; it might be just enough to make a career in jewel heists a real possibility.
Note that by handling the game in this way we make player autonomy a possibility. That is, the instinct is no longer to freak out that players went somewhere unplanned and then to put impossible obstacles up to prevent them from proceeding. Instead you determine reasonable obstacles, which they either will be able to overcome or they will not. Now players have a real reason to consider all sort of out-of-combat skills, since they know that they can encounter situations where the roll of the die may actually let them proceed or not, regardless of what the GM had originally planned. That is, they are not in the "Mother May I" type of gameplay where they can do things but only with GM consent, so their decisions before that point didn't really matter.
"Mother May I" gameplay also makes combat worse. Suppose that the GM had decided that the rogue's "time to shine" would be to unlock a door that the villain had fled behind. The party gets to that door after fighting some of the villain's minions. Now suppose that the rogue gets killed in that combat, or is even incapacitated. Then the villain gets away, since no one can unlock this door. After all, it was a door designed for the rogue to unlock, not a door that was designed in universe. As a consequence if a GM doesn't want the villain to get away at this point, then the rogue cannot die in combat. Critical hits against the rogue will have to be fudged so that the rogue survives. And suddenly the one area where player decisions and rolls still mattered, i.e. combat, also ends up not mattering.
Many modern RPG fans have embraced this mindset. A controversial question these days is "should PCs be allowed to die?" Now in games through the 2000's or so the answer would have been "yes, obviously." But there are many people who say that it isn't appropriate for a PC to die when fighting some random mooks, or from triggering the trap on a random chest, etc. And the reason is that it is understood that there are certain parts of the game that actually matter, and some that are window dressing. So a common response is "PCs should be allowed to die when in a climactic battle against the villains but not otherwise, except perhaps if they are really, really, really stupid." But if the players are playing with these rules known, what constitutes stupid behavior? If a party is tired has no healing potions and sees a band of orcs, then attacking them may be stupid. But if they know that these are just "minions" that they are invulerable against, why not attack them? But on the other hand, considering that the combat will have no tension and probably no real reward, why bother? After all the game is now just spinning wheels until reaching the "climax" so why not just try to speed things up to get to that point?
And this is where we start to really get into the contradictions. Modern gamers attempted to make the game have a more dynamic story, but they ended up creating a style of gameplay equivalent to fastforwarding through the majority of a movie. They attempted to make noncombat actions "shine" by having the GM design things for a specific party, but they ended up making noncombat actions pointless and making combat an even bigger focus. It is their attempts to "fix" the story which forced the game into a laser focus on one climactic battle (and thus made all game balance revolve around what would help you in that climactic battle.) But they lack the context to even understand why what they are doing is not working, much less to solve these problems. Thus they double down on discussions about combat, as much as they claim to hate it, since that's the last remaining sliver of the game that they can still recognize as being a game.
March 26, 2023