Is D&D a challenging game?

[.Zero]

With the extremely huge amount of material, a PC, can be nearly invincible. There are tons of broken spell, feats and classes, cheap magic items, tactics and the like that a player can manage to do in order to assure his PC's immortality. So, what can a DM do? And where's the fun with that? Obviously I'm talking about practical optimization.

Think of a paranoid wizard with access to the strongest, nastiest, most broken spells and feats. He's not going to cheese anything, but his overwhelming powers simply derives from those feats, spells and equipment. He's protected in a lot of ways and can still nuke every opponent. Now, imagine a party of tier one classes that do the same thing, with the same level of optimization. I think that even a party of uberchargers can be difficult to handle. What such a party is supposed to fight? How can they be stopped? And if they always win, how can players and DMs have fun? Is everyone supposed to limit and nerf their PCs? Or there's actually a way to enjoy a high power game? And even if it is possible to play such a campaign, will every fight be reduced to an initiative check?

Remember: we're talking about a campaign where everything is allowed, but no one is going to cheese, (so let's say that classes like incantatrix, thrallherd and planar shepherd are banned), and the party is made of a wizard, a druid, an archivist and an artificer.
No one will make some wierd dip games, break WBL, but will not limit themselves in the choice of spells, domains, magic items and feats.
No custom magic items, spells or feats allowed. No dragon magazine, dragon compendium is ok. Everyone is supposed to use printed material only.

Is this game enjoyable?

And now, to summarize: is 3.5 system failing to support a high power game based upon RAW, with no houserules?

I've never played past level 6, but i can surely say that, yes, the system itself is broken.

[ryu]

What challenges a party of tier ones practically optimized? A different party of tier ones similarly optimized. As for conflict information gathering and willingness to plan multiple steps into the meta are going to be the deciding factors to victory. If combat isn't decided well before people actually meet in person both sides are being quite sloppy.

[Eldaran]

The DM has unlimited power. Unless the PCs have some literally game breaking builds like Pun-Pun, there's no amount of practical optimization a DM can't still challenge.

[jiriku]

I have run games at high levels under extremely high optimization. It is possible to have a fun, enjoyable game and to have varied, interesting encounters. However, the amount of work required for the players to manage their characters increases, and the amount of work required for the DM to prepare encounters grows dramatically. All of the players had laptops and spreadsheets to manage their characters, and developing encounters and optimizing opponents occupied me for between 10 and 30 hours per week. If you love the hobby and have lots of free time so that you enjoy what you're doing, that's an acceptable time commitment. However, many players aren't that committed to the hobby, and many DMs don't have that kind of time to invest.

[Flavel]

At a certain point, a well optimized party is going to steam roll most individual challenges. Yes, there are some critters that are incredibly dangerous but they are also very rare.

Where it becomes more challenging is when the PCs are interacting with exotic organizations. Such as a Drow city in the Underdark, or the City of Brass in the Elemental plane of fire.

It's not too difficult to steer the party into these locals as higher level characters usually have requirements regarding provisions, sage advice, spell components, etc. that the village of Hommlet will not be able to fulfill.

Speaking of which, does anyone know which city in Hell has the best lawyers?

[Seto]

A player can have an extremely powerful and optimized Wizard. The DM ? Has as many extremely optimized Wizards as he wants. Plus, the DM can throw encounter after encounter at the PCs, who only have so many resources for the day (as opposed to each opponent who starts fresh). So, no, if you're not too cheesy, you can't get to a point where the game has nothing to oppose you.

The DM is another matter, though. Some DM aren't very good at optimizing, or play things by the book and only give you CR-appropriate encounters from the Monster Manual, without giving the monsters class levels, etc. Then yes, D&D can seem like an easy game.

As a rule, the higher-level a PC gets, the harder to kill he becomes. A DM may hold punches until mid-levels, but starting from level 10-11, killing monsters gets easier. But for a clever/experienced DM, the game has near-infinite resources to make it very challenging, at pretty much any level.

[NichG]

The thread title and the text of your opening post ask very different questions.

- Is D&D a challenging game?

By design, not really. Putting aside all the optimization/etc stuff, the game itself is designed so that you can roughly play the same character across hundreds of battles and manage to survive. That means that the chance of death in any individual battle has to be very low - less than 1%. So intrinsically, D&D is intentionally weighted strongly towards the PCs.

- Is that kind of game fun?

Yes, absolutely. The alternative, something where you'd have a 50/50 chance of dying in every battle, would very much not be fun. It'd be a highly dysfunctional game of another sort.

The key thing is to recognize that life or death isn't the interesting question to ask in a D&D campaign. What's interesting is 'how do you resolve this problem?'. The process that the PCs choose to resolve their problems, even if that resolution is inevitable, is where the meat of the gameplay is. Not 'do you win?' but 'how do you win?'. Think of it as something like a brain teaser. The thing that makes it interesting isn't that you might fail, but that the process of getting to an eventually inevitable success requires you to go through particular mental gyrations. Those mental gyrations are the actual enjoyable part, in principle.

[jiriku]

The DM is another matter, though. Some DM aren't very good at optimizing, or play things by the book and only give you CR-appropriate encounters from the Monster Manual, without giving the monsters class levels, etc. Then yes, D&D can seem like an easy game.

This is very true. As a player, I often have to hold back when playing for an inexperienced DM. When the DM doesn't understand the rules well, or is busy and mostly just uses stock encounters out of the book with only basic tactics, I could easily build a character that he doesn't know how to challenge effectively. And of course, you certainly don't want to optimize well past the level of your fellow players; then if the DM sent you a challenging fight the others would have no options except to hide and try not to die.

[jjcrpntr]

I would say it's not challenging as much as I would say it can be overwhelming.

I started playing 3.5 last September and our original game was Core only. That got expanded, pretty much to damn near every book available by session 3 (we changed dms). So my first character was a cleric. Once other books got available our dm and one other player started throwing ideas at me for what I could do with my character. I started reading through PDF's of as many books as I could get and I thought my brain was going to explode. For a new player there's a ton of material out there for you to sort through.

[jedipotter]

Is this game enjoyable?


It can be. Some players like to just auto win and steamroll over any foe. It's fun for them.

It won't be fun for lots of other players, who want more from the game then just a quick power trip.



Yes, absolutely. The alternative, something where you'd have a 50/50 chance of dying in every battle, would very much not be fun. It'd be a highly dysfunctional game of another sort.

Now, see I'm 180 from this viewpoint. It think the game should be 50/50 chance of character death....or worse. The idea of ''you have already automatiacly won, lets just play to see how you win'' is no fun to me. And I'd say playing with no loss is dysfunctional.

[NichG]

Now, see I'm 180 from this viewpoint. It think the game should be 50/50 chance of character death....or worse. The idea of ''you have already automatiacly won, lets just play to see how you win'' is no fun to me. And I'd say playing with no loss is dysfunctional.

The problem with this is that statistically, at least under the assumptions used in D&D 3.5, you need to make about 2 new characters every session.

Notice, you get different results when you say 'the campaign should have a 50/50 chance of character death', 'the session should have a 50/50 chance of character death', and 'the battle should have a 50/50 chance of character death'.

If a campaign is 400 battles and a session is 4 battles, then the per-battle rates of character death that give that outcome are respectively: 0.17%, 16%, and 50%

So if you're going for a 50/50 chance of each character surviving the campaign, the per-battle/per-character death rate should be about 2 tenths of a percent. And that still means that someone has only a 50/50 shot at surviving the entire campaign. That's the statistical reality of iterated games with an absorbing state (character death).

Now, the problem is that this ends up being really swingy. Most of those character deaths that do occur will occur because of freak happenstance rather than player error, because its so hard to actually die in an individual fight, which isn't great design. You can basically draw from that a couple different conclusions:

- The game is better if it isn't governed by the question of partition into an absorbing state. The reason the statistics are so silly is because 'once you die its over' for that character. If instead of life/death you asked questions about resources used, fraction of the game-world's population saved, etc, then the per-battle statistics can be much more harsh without destabilizing the game as a whole.

- If you want to make life or death depend more on player decisions, you need to either use far fewer battles (10 over the course of a character's career) or split the battles into ones whose purpose is resource attrition (mooks) and ones whose purpose is deciding life and death (boss fights), such that you only have a small number of boss fights over the course of the campaign, which have a much higher death rate than normal.

[Emperor Tippy]

The thread title and the text of your opening post ask very different questions.

- Is D&D a challenging game?

By design, not really. Putting aside all the optimization/etc stuff, the game itself is designed so that you can roughly play the same character across hundreds of battles and manage to survive. That means that the chance of death in any individual battle has to be very low - less than 1%. So intrinsically, D&D is intentionally weighted strongly towards the PCs.

That's not actually true. If the DM is running D&D straight as the rules are written and intended then, on average, you should see something like 3 total PC deaths per level. The thing is that D&D is also built so that death is not a major issue for the majority of the game. When you hit real high level play you can expect multiple deaths per encounter.

Hell, one game I was in had no less than thirty eight PC deaths among a 4 PC party in one battle. Granted part of that was because of the PC builds involved the PC committing suicide.

[Vedhin]

Granted part of that was because of the PC builds involved the PC committing suicide.

Okay, I want to know this. Wu Jen+Body Outside Body+Transcend Mortality+Emerald Immolation?

[jedipotter]

The problem with this is that statistically, at least under the assumptions used in D&D 3.5, you need to make about 2 new characters every session.

Notice, you get different results when you say 'the campaign should have a 50/50 chance of character death', 'the session should have a 50/50 chance of character death', and 'the battle should have a 50/50 chance of character death'.



This is not a problem. Death is part of the game. It is why characters have Hit Points. I know a lot of players look at HP as ''something I minus from time to time for no reason to play the game''. I look at HP as ''how long you will get to play this character''.

I'd say the chance should be 50/50 per round or minute!

A lot of people play D&D more like one of the Storytelling RPGs. Where everyone is just telling a group story. But D&D is a combat based game, not a story game. Almost none of the rules help you tell a story as having 15 hit points and a +5 to spot don't give the story anything.

I generaly kill a good two or three characters a game..

[NichG]

That's not actually true. If the DM is running D&D straight as the rules are written and intended then, on average, you should see something like 3 total PC deaths per level. The thing is that D&D is also built so that death is not a major issue for the majority of the game. When you hit real high level play you can expect multiple deaths per encounter.

Hell, one game I was in had no less than thirty eight PC deaths among a 4 PC party in one battle. Granted part of that was because of the PC builds involved the PC committing suicide.

Is this using monsters straight from the Monster Manual as written, or is this using NPC enemies who have class levels and gear? I would expect a much higher fatality rate with DM-designed adversaries from a subset of DMs because their performance is going to scale with the DM optimization ability to a greater degree than Monster Manual prebuilts (which generally are horribly designed from an optimization point of view).

[toapat]

A lot of people play D&D more like one of the Storytelling RPGs. Where everyone is just telling a group story. But D&D is a combat based game, not a story game. Almost none of the rules help you tell a story as having 15 hit points and a +5 to spot don't give the story anything.

I generaly kill a good two or three characters a game..

Unless you are running Shadowrun's 6pack of lives, then i have no idea why anyone lets you play or DM of your group for more then one session. Storytelling is fun and a massive portion of the game, theres a reason why half of the material printed accounts for storytelling and not mechanics.

Every extreme lethality system which was intended to do so has extremely light if existant at all fluff. DnD is not Munchkin, the social contracts between players is vastly different in a game where it is expected for your character to die 5-6 times a session and endevors to ensure that players expect to die. Character creation is much more efficient in high lethality systems then DnD's minimum half hour rolling a new character.

[Kazudo]

I kill a character once in a while, but if I feel like the story would benefit from character death, I discuss it out of the game with players who have discussed their wishes to alter their character seriously and ask if they'd like to volunteer to have the rocks dropped on them. If I don't get any volunteers, I usually push that plan off for a while, get a DMPC into the game and into everyone's good graces, then kill them off instead.

Once in a while characters get themselves killed, but there's always the option to have them resurrected, and the players have learned to take a very direct "where's the body" approach. I've brought characters back from what appeared to be sudden death after the players buried the body, had a tearful ceremony, left, the player rolled up a new character, then I talked to them OOC to see if they wanted that character back albeit at one less level than everyone else. Sometimes they like the idea, sometimes they want the character to be a bad guy, whatever. I enjoy a good story even if I'm not the only one who wrote it.

The challenge is for DMs to be good DMs without being too much DM. It's like in Futurama: When you're doing it right, the players shouldn't know you're doing anything at all. But with storytelling. And they probably know, but at least they think they made the decisions. And they might have. Oh well, we had fun.

[georgie_leech]

I'd say the chance should be 50/50 per round or minute!



Fundamental differences in gaming philosophy aside, it's not possible to have a 50% chance of death every round and minute simultaneously; that would be the equivalent of saying flipping a coin and getting a single head and flipping that same coin ten times in a row and having them all heads are the same odds.

[Kazudo]

In games like Legend of the Five Rings and Paranoia and some World of Darkness variants I can see death being a far more likely thing (Legend of the Five Rings goes for realism in that department, getting hit makes you suck in combat like it really would, while Paranoia just...Well, it kills you. Several times. In a row. Consecutively. And it charges you per death. Oh lawd), D&D is almost a parody of fantasy where you are above and beyond the normal commoner and CAN take supernatural amounts of damage. I mean, when you figure that most characters deviate from their race's normal statblock BEFORE THEY TAKE THEIR FIRST LEVEL IN A CLASS, it officially leaves the realms of perfect common sense.

[Gemini476]

Is this using monsters straight from the Monster Manual as written, or is this using NPC enemies who have class levels and gear? I would expect a much higher fatality rate with DM-designed adversaries from a subset of DMs because their performance is going to scale with the DM optimization ability to a greater degree than Monster Manual prebuilts (which generally are horribly designed from an optimization point of view).

Remember that 5% of battles are supposed to have an EL 5+ higher than the party, and that one of the pre-built encounters in the Monster Manual is a hundred centaurs (EL 15, IIRC).

Also, most of the time when monsters have class levels they don't mention the class, not to mention the feats and spells known and such. Centaurs have 9th level leaders, for instance, but what class is that? Derro have 8th level sorcerers, but what spells do they know?
I generally assume that they have Warrior as their class in the former case, but you can do some quite nasty tricks with that!

And, again, a 17th level Wizard is supposed to be a valid encounter for a 12th level party. It's an encounter they're supposed to run from, granted, but it's an encounter.

Not to mention the minuscule chance of a 1st level party walking in a dungeon when the DM just won't stop rolling tens on the encounter table and a Balor shows up.

I mean, even the DMG has a page where it says "there's always someone stronger than the PCs". Even if the major cities only have 16th level wizards by the (non-epic world) demographics tables, there are still quite a few critters out there with access to ninth-level spells. And beyond. Did you know that the lich-queen of the Githyanki, as printed, has Epic Spellcasting? And she's supposed to be fought by a non-epic party.

[SiuiS]

Is this game enjoyable?

And now, to summarize: is 3.5 system failing to support a high power game based upon RAW, with no houserules?

I've never played past level 6, but i can surely say that, yes, the system itself is broken.

Yes. It is enjoyable.

The idea seems to be that only by "winning" against the players sometimes can the DM have fun. But that's just really bad storytelling. Say your players always win, no matter what? Well, they aren't always discriminate about what they're winning are they? That hubris is the story. Say the players are taking on things that they simply shouldn't be taking on? Upstart mortals have disrupted the whole world, and that's the story.

There are completely successful game systems where party minions function like ammo, where infinite money is a given and finding a buyer is the hard part, where consolidating your power just means everyone else was achieving things while you dawdled, where getting you to blow limited but world-shaking resources is how to weaken you. So why is a thrallherd, WBL cheese, maximizing party gear or bringing an incatator or DMM nightstick cleric to the table bad?

The problem is not with D&D's rules. Other games do the exact same thing and it's fun! The problem is with D&D's players, and their ideas about how "all games should work".

[NichG]

Remember that 5% of battles are supposed to have an EL 5+ higher than the party, and that one of the pre-built encounters in the Monster Manual is a hundred centaurs (EL 15, IIRC).

Yes, see my point about boss fights. Thats already a factor of 1/20. So there are 20 such fights in a campaign of 400 battles, or approximately one such fight every five sessions.

[jedipotter]

Unless you are running Shadowrun's 6pack of lives, then i have no idea why anyone lets you play or DM of your group for more then one session. Storytelling is fun and a massive portion of the game, theres a reason why half of the material printed accounts for storytelling and not mechanics.

Every extreme lethality system which was intended to do so has extremely light if existant at all fluff. DnD is not Munchkin, the social contracts between players is vastly different in a game where it is expected for your character to die 5-6 times a session and endevors to ensure that players expect to die. Character creation is much more efficient in high lethality systems then DnD's minimum half hour rolling a new character.

Well, hard core death games are fun too. The D&D rules are mostly for combat, and a little for adventure. There just is not that much else to D&D. Fluff is just fluff.

If you want a Storytelling game, there are plenty of great RPG made for that type of role-playing.

And what, just as it take you so long to make a character, your character should be immortal? Well, that is not my view.....

[toapat]

Well, hard core death games are fun too. The D&D rules are mostly for combat, and a little for adventure. There just is not that much else to D&D. Fluff is just fluff.

If you want a Storytelling game, there are plenty of great RPG made for that type of role-playing.

And what, just as it take you so long to make a character, your character should be immortal? Well, that is not my view.....

1: combat is an art, story is freeform
2: Nothing should be immortal. That doesnt mean that the system is about meatgrinding PCs. Character-creation is exactly as detailed as how much the devs believe a character should survive. This is why systems like GURPS are not combat focused. This is why character creation in munchkin is extremely simple.
3: Im sorry, but if Gygax and his friends and family didnt care about having personal investment in characters then DnD wouldnt exist.
4: Literally NOTHING is more common in the books than storytelling material.

[Eldaran]

Well, hard core death games are fun too. The D&D rules are mostly for combat, and a little for adventure. There just is not that much else to D&D. Fluff is just fluff.

If you want a Storytelling game, there are plenty of great RPG made for that type of role-playing.

And what, just as it take you so long to make a character, your character should be immortal? Well, that is not my view.....

It sounds more like you want a wargame. D&D is definitely a storytelling game, and I think that's how 95% of groups play it.

[Vedhin]

It sounds more like you want a wargame. D&D is definitely a storytelling game, and I think that's how 95% of groups play it.

It actually makes a good wargame too. That's where it came from, after all.

That's also one of my favorite things about D&D 3.5. There's just so much variety. You can have campaigns that go entire sessions with only a handful of die rolls, or you can have campaigns that never go beyond "I roll Diplomcay". Then there's the entire spectrum in the middle.

[Anachronity]

It really, really, really depends on the people playing. D&D is a fantasy game, and the type of fantasy game it is depends on the players and DM.

Some players want a power fantasy where they face off against the most fearsome and badass foes and still always come out on top.

Some players want a heroic fantasy where death only happens if it happens in a blaze of glory against the fiend lord Xzart'grund at the very gates of hell itself.

Some players want a gritty, realistic fantasy where characters will survive as long as they're careful and clever, but not a second longer.

Some players want a horror fantasy where death lurks around every corner, the innocent often die for no reason at all, and death is the least horrible way to go.

Naturally DMs enjoy the same sorts of fantasy, although a power fantasy is much different from the DM's perspective where the DM wants the most decked out and optimized PCs upon which to unleash his hordes of Half-Minotaur Monstrous Crabs and Necropolitan Beholders. These DMs are typically pretty hard to get along with since their own self-restraint is all that is holding them back, unlike PCs who have (admittedly broken) rules.

If you're a DM with the first type of players, odds are they don't want to feel challenged; they want to feel powerful and badass.


All of that aside, from a purely mechanical perspective it's all chance. Odds are your players will best Blastwart the mighty and his legions of minions only to later die to random axe-wielding orc #3 when he rolls double 20s on an attack and lands that x3 crit. Or maybe everyone happens to fail the save and strength checks against a web spell from the 4th-level kobold sorcerer mook and gets killed by archer fire just because they roll poorly.

[Yahzi]

By design, not really.
The entire spell list is designed from the point of view of a caster attempting to break into a fortified place, kill the inhabitants, and steal their treasure. Defense was left to DM fiat (hence so many dungeons with teleport traps and adamantium doors). This becomes a noticeable problem the minute the players want to stop being murder-hobos and try and build something.

So ya, if you want to make D&D challenging, try building a castle and defending it against adventurers. Basically, try playing D&D as anything but murder-hobos.

[GoodbyeSoberDay]

I'm with Tippy on this one. The game was designed for characters to die. At low levels, you shrug and make a new character. At higher levels, death is more like getting KO'd anyway. This isn't to say that D&D is an utter meatgrinder with a power-tripping character-murdering* DM, where you should bring a binder filled with backup sheets every session. That game is called Paranoia, and it's only really fun in that context. But D&D characters do die.

At a certain point it becomes difficult for the DM to challenge players... but possible. I'm currently working on challenging high level gestalt characters with ridiculous numbers. All it takes is for me to throw the CR system in the garbage (where it belongs), pump HD to high heavens, and reselect feats. And if I'm feeling saucy, I'll give 'em equipment.

*The difference between character killing and character murdering is the DM's intent, of course.

[Gemini476]

I'm with Tippy on this one. The game was designed for characters to die. At low levels, you shrug and make a new character. At higher levels, death is more like getting KO'd anyway. This isn't to say that D&D is an utter meatgrinder with a power-tripping character-murdering* DM, where you should bring a binder filled with backup sheets every session. That game is called Paranoia, and it's only really fun in that context. But D&D characters do die.

At a certain point it becomes difficult for the DM to challenge players... but possible. I'm currently working on challenging high level gestalt characters with ridiculous numbers. All it takes is for me to throw the CR system in the garbage (where it belongs), pump HD to high heavens, and reselect feats. And if I'm feeling saucy, I'll give 'em equipment.

*The difference between character killing and character murdering is the DM's intent, of course.

You don't really need a binder of character sheets for Paranoia - you get some free clones, after all, so you just adjust some numbers on your current sheet and continue onwards.

Now, low-level pre-3rd Edition D&D? Yeah, that's more lethal. Less HP all around, less damage, more things that are actually dangerous. But character generation only took five minutes or so, so it's alright.
Character generation in 3E can take half an hour or more if you're starting at a high level, and 4E is only faster because of the Character Builder. Note how those editions also put a lot of focus on your character in particular and have generally more durable characters!

Generally, the simpler the character generation the more lethal the game can afford to be. If death knocks a player out of the game for an hour, that's not very fun. If it knocks them out for a minute, like in RISUS, you can go full killer DM on them without too much complaining.
If character generation boils down to rolling 3d6 in order, choosing a class, and grabbing a kit of preset equipment? Yeah, that doesn't take up too much time.
If you need to roll 4d6 (drop the lowest) six times, assign them to attributes, choose a race, choose a class, distribute skill points, choose feats, repeat the last three steps until you are at the correct level, and shop around for equipment? That's annoying enough that you're reluctant to die since you'd need to redo it. Why do you think Fighty McBuffington is so often succeeded by his brother, Fighty McBuffington II?
If you're handed a thousand points and told to spend them in various amounts to buy stats/skills/traits/flaws/bodies/extra starting cash/reputation/psionic powers/probably more that I've forgotten and then spend your money on buying more bodies/weapons/armor/cybernetics/miscellania? Well, first off you should get Transhuman since the standard Eclipse Phase character generation is awful and needs spreadsheets. I should note, however, that this is a game where even if you die you get to keep your current character sheet since brain scans and backups are awesome. People kind of like that, and that is because character generation is really tedious.

[jedipotter]

1: combat is an art, story is freeform
2: Nothing should be immortal. That doesnt mean that the system is about meatgrinding PCs. Character-creation is exactly as detailed as how much the devs believe a character should survive. This is why systems like GURPS are not combat focused. This is why character creation in munchkin is extremely simple.
3: Im sorry, but if Gygax and his friends and family didnt care about having personal investment in characters then DnD wouldnt exist.
4: Literally NOTHING is more common in the books than storytelling material.

1. How about combat is rules heavy, story is freeform
2.Nothing is immortal
3.You should be ''invested'' in a character, but not so much as to make them immortal.
4.Nothing is more common then combat and adventure materal.


It sounds more like you want a wargame. D&D is definitely a storytelling game, and I think that's how 95% of groups play it.

D&D is a combat adventure game. Most of the rules are all about combat or adventure. Does D&D even have any ''storytelling'' rules? What chapter and in what book are they in? Combat gets a whole chapter, so ''Storytelling'' must have at least one whole chapter of rules, right?

I'll agree that 95% of people play D&D ''like a Storytelling Game'', but D&D does not support that type of play in the rules. Just compare D&D to any real storytelling game.

[Eldaran]

D&D is a combat adventure game. Most of the rules are all about combat or adventure. Does D&D even have any ''storytelling'' rules? What chapter and in what book are they in? Combat gets a whole chapter, so ''Storytelling'' must have at least one whole chapter of rules, right?

I'll agree that 95% of people play D&D ''like a Storytelling Game'', but D&D does not support that type of play in the rules. Just compare D&D to any real storytelling game.

I'd argue adventure is a type of storytelling, what else do you consider many of the adventure novels?

Did you miss the massive amount of non-combat related stuff in the core rule books? Going through the books PHB first: Chapter 2 is mostly story information, the statistics of the races is a minority of the info. Chapter 3 is about 1/5th story, each class starts with a long section of story before delving into the mechanics. Chapter 4 covers skills, and skills are almost entirely story. Some can be used in combat, like tumble, but most are not. Chapter 5 feats is mostly mechanical, though some feats are non-combat related. Chapter 6 is entirely story related, almost none of it has any bearing on combat. Chapter 7 is a mix of combat items, like weapons and armor, and non combat items like tools and food and such. Chapter 8 is of course all combat related. Chapter 9 has some info for combat, like carrying capacity and breaking objects, but much of it has no bearing on combat. Chapter 10 and 11 cover spells and how they work, I'd say the majority of it relates to combat, but plenty of spells have roleplaying only uses.

So, overall, I see a lot of rules and info for storytelling, roleplaying, and adventuring. None of which is combat.

[toapat]

1. How about combat is rules heavy, story is freeform
2.Nothing is immortal
3.You should be ''invested'' in a character, but not so much as to make them immortal.
4.Nothing is more common then combat and adventure materal.

1: Combat doesnt have any rules whatsoever in 3.5. Its an artform using mechanical actions defined in the game. This is not Warhammer 40k where there is a measurable and explainable science to the game. you have scenarios you follow but there is no complex battleplan based on how to fight your opponent. There is no formal procedure or planning, no real forethought. Only observe and react.
2: Certain things need to be immortal. PCs are not but they also shouldnt be flak in anything without mechanics for dealing with the fact that your character can be killed at the drop of a hat. Either way DnD is not a game where killing a character is intended to be a common occurrence. Just because the game's origins are based on an extremely accurate wargame does not change that.
3: you missed the point. DnD exists because roleplaying is more compelling then wargames will be because you can invest yourself in the characters.
4: Nothing is less common. Adventures are primarily fluff plus a couple of technical pages. Mechanical rules typically dedicate 1 paragraph to crunch and 2 to fluff. The only almost purely mechanical parts of the books are feats, and even those start becoming fluff in later books.