I’ve hit my limit on a particular peeve. It seems that whenever someone mentions that Dungeons and Dragons is combat-centric, someone has to interjects some variation of “it depends on how you run it”.
No, it doesn’t.
D&D is a game about combat. No one is in combat all the time, and there is a lot or role-playing that can happen in-between battles, but those aren’t what the rules are for. When you are playing cops and robbers, you don’t disagree on what you say, or where your station/hideout is; you only need rules for when you are shooting at each other.
D&D started out with people going into dungeons to kill monsters and loot their corpses. It had many layers of complexity added, but the parfait never lost its base of stabby fruit and granola… treasure. This metaphor was going somewhere. At any rate, while it is factually true that it doesn’t have to be run like a combat simulation, it is almost never a useful response.