The fact that people are arguing now whether D&D is a board game or not is a clear indication that they don't fully understand what D&D really is. It is a Roleplaying Game, RPG. The name tells you what kind of game it is. Yes, you CAN play it as a board game if you just take the mechanics of combat and you put down a board and pawns and move them from space to space on the board and just fight monsters and so forth. That is certainly one way to play it.

But that's not what the game is supposed to be. It was designed as a game that you play that is a story game. That's how the original was created and that's how it has traditionally been played throughout the decades since it was first created.

Again, the name says it all. You are meant to play the game by taking on the role of a character. You are supposed to pretend to be that character in a fantasy world setting. You are kind of like an actor/actress, pretending to be this whole different person. The DM is like the story teller and director of the ad-lib play. He guides you through the story, pretends to be the other characters, and so forth. Shoot, in the old days, people used to play the game by dressing up and actually BEING the characters out in the woods and such. I still remember Gen-Con when people would dress up as D&D characters and play together at tables. Yes, they used to sell tabletop/board game type stuff to set up huge maps and displays to create better visuals, but ultimately those were just to enhance gameplay.

But the game is designed so that you have scenes where you do lots of talking and interacting and then lots of scenes where you fight and kill things. Only the killing things scenes would maybe get a board if you want it. Otherwise, you don't really need a board for the talking scenes. Again. You can have one. I used to do that all the time with my players. But, in the end, unless you can constantly change up the board quickly, or you've spent a long time laying out some complex board with lots of locations, it slows the game down a lot to use maps and boards. I tried using electronic maps and such, which is okay, but even that can get tedious.

Why are we even having this discussion about what type of game it is anyway? I thought this thread was about BG3 needing to be more like Solasta with its game mechanics. Who cares what type of game it is? Maybe I missed something in the threads. They're all starting to blend now, so maybe I thought I read this thread through but I didn't.