More Fun than Fighting

I learned something interesting about myself while playing D&D today. Despite designing my characters to be skilled in combat, combat is not the part of D&D that I most enjoy. Case in point, in one game, our characters had just arrived at an interesting location. A huge underground cavern with a narrow bridge leading to a tall pillar with an empty throne. Obviously, this was a location of great importance, a location made all the more interesting when our Perception checks revealed that there were armed skeletons lying on the throned pillar. However, I found myself unsurprised and disappointed when the skeletons got up and started fighting our characters. Just as I was beginning to take in the scene in my mind and imagine who had constructed this place and for what reason, my immersion was broken by a roll for initiative, and the experience was reduced to a game of dice and numbers. And, sure, the combat was fun. I got to roll a lot of dice and add them up to some pretty high numbers, but the most enjoyment I got out of that encounter was finding a letter on the body of one of the skeletons, giving us a clue of who was behind some of the nefarious events that had taken place and a hint about which interesting location we would be exploring next.

Another example: In my Pirate-themed campaign, there were two combat encounters, and they were both fairly interesting. One of them involved fighting a naga at the bottom of a murky river, and the other involved fending off a swarm of giant wasps. Both of those fights were more inventive than a typical skeleton fight, and I again enjoyed rolling several dice and adding up big numbers, but after the battles and the gaming session were over, I was a little bit disappointed that the session didn't seem to do much to advance the overarching story. If this campaign were a TV show, I would have called this session a "filler episode." And, granted, there's not much wrong with that. Combat is fun, and after not fighting at all in the last session, it made sense, in terms of pacing, for us to do some fighting this session, but I learned tonight that I would rather have a story-driven game session with no combat than a combat-driven session with no story. I'll gladly take both when I can get them both, but when I can only get one, I've learned that I prefer story.

I can get into why I love story-telling another time, but for now, I just wanted to share this self-revelation. While I enjoy making characters who excel in combat and win tough fights, I have more fun crafting characters who make interesting decisions and have interesting things happen to him. My favorite thing about Krusk Bloodfist isn't how strong his is, how devastating he is with a greataxe, or how much better he'd be than anyone else in a fist-fight. My favorite things about Krusk are the terrible decisions he has made and the terrible consequences he'll face as a result. I love how torn he is between  the woman who may have betrayed him and the goddess who saved his life. Krusk has plenty of combat prowess, but he also is brimming with emotion, and I love the latter more than I love the former.

This knowledge might affect the way I create characters and the way I play D&D. I'll continue to try to make my characters competent in a fight, but that may not be as much of an essential feature anymore. If I make a character like the Dexterity-based Paladin/Rogue who was designed to add lots of d6s and d8s to his melee attacks, I will also make sure I delve into the question of how he reconciles simultaneously being a Paladin and a Rogue. There's a story there, and I want to focus more on that story than on what that adds to his damage rolls.