Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
I very heavily disagree.

Combat doesn't have to be an activity where the whole engages. It might be something, that only the combattants do. Like scouting is often something the scout does alone and like negoatiation is often something the face or the character with the highest social status does. Or crafting is what the crafter does. Or the cyberspace excusion is something the hacker does.

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That D&D so heavily relies on "combat is for everyone" is the main reaso, it can't have proper fighters. Because the difference between someone specialized in combat and a civillian is not allowed to exist for PCs. That is not alwqays the case in other games.
Way true. Played a Shadowrun character in a party of combat whores, covered essentially everything except fighting & stealth. Think I fired my gun twice in a whole campaign and took damage once (who the frakkin heck snipes a couple suits lunching in McDs with a bloody anti-tank rocket!? never did find out). Naturally the session RL made me miss was the one where they pulled a stupid & TPKed.

D&Ds are mainly a combat system plus some accumulated cruft bits, and get more & more balanced around everyone being numerically equal in combat as the editions progress. As the various noncombat cruft gets dropped (hex crawling, realm management, built in money sinks, etc.) the combat engine takes over and is pushed towards nobody being allowed to be sub-optimal in combat, not even the NPCs. Then, in a never ending spiral of "simpler" vs "balanced numbers", you reduce everything to numbers as simply as possible by making the combat all about damage/dpr without other 'win conditions' in the rules.

Try to balance combat by making each PC contribute. Find that non-damage contribution valuation is tricky & difficult. Simplify combat by reducing or removing rules support for encounter solutions that aren't about damaging creatures to zero hp. Balance combat by making everyone do similar damage/mitigation totals. You can do it, mmos have done it for a long time.