>>What's wrong with developing skills that don't revolve around crushing hundreds of skulls? What's wrong with developing guilds around activities other than combat?
It's less about forcing everyone into a combat role, and more about not pigeonholing entire classes.
Further, I think a quick look at the various guilds' abilities will reveal that a guild's strengths and weaknesses are still taken into account when developing that guild's spells and abilities. There are probably some exceptions that got grandfathered in, but in general (at least recently), we've been committed to ensuring that spells and abilities are thematically appropriate.
>>Return on investment.
This is also something to take into account.
Combat and combat-related systems have probably had the most GM time chucked at them over the years. Even if the entire current dev staff turned over tomorrow, that would almost certainly continue to be true. There have been cool non-combat related abilities created, but typically they have much fewer hours invested in them, and their maintenance has been inconsistent. See: Pearl diving, archaeology, the task system, and I'm sure there are more. Even if I spent the next year developing a cool new non-combat system, there's unfortunately no way to guarantee that it would be maintained after I am gone. See: the horse and boat systems.
Crafting is an awesome notable exception to this rule, but in general I think it's a good thing that we're past the days of barring certain guilds from meaningful participation in combat, since I think combat and its related systems are really among the crowning jewels of DragonRealms. Or the rambling medieval palace that each new King keeps adding to, until it's a drafty labyrinth that no one has an accurate floor plan for, but, you know, we love it anyway.
|