Wizards of the Coast has caused a little bit of a stir in the tabletop community with the advertising of their new book. D&D says its new adventure book, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (WBW) is possible to complete without engaging in combat.
Now, most situations in a D&D game should be presented with the possibility of avoiding combat. That’s just good open design.
But, if you’re going to play an entire adventure without combat, you should probably be playing another game. Why is that?
D&D is fundamentally a game about combat. That’s what most of its rules are for. That’s what most of your character features do. When you advance and get more powerful–whether that’s through killing monsters and gaining XP, or from talking through social situations and surpassing leveling milestones–you generally get more combat powers. Where fighting to get stronger makes sense, there’s a certain incongruity with talking…
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