I think the story of how Dungeons & Dragons started out as a mod to a war game. Which means the roots of the role-playing gene are very deep in the war game gene. Everything has to start from somewhere after all. But is time to cut those roots?

There seem to be a lot of issues that stem from the conventions of war games that just don't work as well in the role-playing context. I have decided to divide this up by the resulting issue. First because they are more tangible and second because they give more granularity. And hence more opportunities for fun titles.

Soldiers March to War
Combatants, everyone players someone who can fight. Why can't I play the comms. guy, who could fire a gun (is in the army) but probably couldn't hit a moving target with it? Well because being a PC automatically gives me an accuracy bonus for some reason. I can play a hundred variants of soldier, battle cyborg or battle mage, but I have to stretch it to play a wandering crafter, a corporate sponsor or an academic.

The Never-Ending Battle
Combat becoming so common has several problems for role-playing characters. But wait! "Role-playing doesn't stop when you pick up the dice." Yes, I get it, that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how when you calculate a modifier you are not thinking about the character's character. If you spend a lot of time working out the best move in this situation, even if it is because your character is a brilliant tactician and would do that. The level of detail is unnecessary for characterization, but in systems with detailed combat you have to slog through it anyways.

What's more is any single activity has a much narrower range of characterization opportunities than all of them. So focusing on any one can drain that range without exploring many other spaces, or doing so very sparsely.

Downtime
As much as combat gets detailed, other things are left vague and shallow. Meaning it is really hard to engage in many of those activities in a meaningful way. So even if you create a combatant with other skills important to their character, playing through those will likely be rather uninteresting.

This compounds the above issues by guiding the game towards the mechanically interesting sections and character concepts. It also means the system overall is less likely to be able to handle the non-combat sections of story that are likely to crop up eventually.

Front line & Special Units
A contributing factor to the whole caster/martial thing. Some units hold the line, others do cleaver and complex things to change the flow of battle. It works in war games where everyone is a swarm of front line soldiers and a couple of special units. However that completely breaks down when you focus that in on single character (not necessarily of the same type) for each player

Balance for the War God
Now there are several meanings of balance in this context. "Equal ability to contribute in a fight" is possibly the least interesting and yet it becomes one of the most important once combat becomes common. Otherwise you are disconnected from the game for large sections while the combat plays out.

The definition we are actually looking for might be better described in terms of spotlight time. But when the game is about half combat, those distinctions start to fall away and it becomes necessary for characters to be balanced in the combat sense to keep the game fun and active for all players.

Missed Who for the What
This may be just an order of operations thing but I still feel like character descriptions starting off with "Barbarian 2/Ranger 1" are kind of missing the point. Who is your character? A strong warrior who hunts to feed the members of her extended family. That gives me way more information.

More than the others this one is kind of a soft line, but it does mimic a war game's "West Folk got a new stealth sniper solo" that probably does have some flavour text, but you flip through that in the lore later after figuring out if the new unit makes in into your army.


So those are things that can be attributed to the war game roots of role-playing games. Most are dragging the hobby down to some degree. Or at least when unquestioned. I'm not going to say that every system with a separate combat role from a skill check is bad. Nor is it wrong to have a tactical game with some role-playing thrown on top.

But these things should probably not be considered the standard for role-playing games. The time has come for role-playing games to be stand on their own, without using the crutches of their early development.