D&D 5E Is D&D 90% Combat?

In response to Cubicle 7’s announcement that their next Doctor Who role playing game would be powered by D&D 5E, there was a vehement (and in some places toxic) backlash on social media. While that backlash has several dimensions, one element of it is a claim that D&D is mainly about combat.

Head of D&D Ray Winninger disagreed (with snark!), tweeting "Woke up this morning to Twitter assuring me that [D&D] is "ninety percent combat." I must be playing (and designing) it wrong." WotC's Dan Dillon also said "So guess we're gonna recall all those Wild Beyond the Witchlight books and rework them into combat slogs, yeah? Since we did it wrong."

So, is D&D 90% combat?



And in other news, attacking C7 designers for making games is not OK.

D&D 5E - Doctors & Daleks - Cubicle 7 Brings Doctor Who to D&D 5E

Cubicle 7 -- makers of the official Doctor Who roleplaying game -- has announced that the Doctor will officially be coming to 5E soon under the name Doctors and Daleks. There are no dates or details yet, over than that the Doctors and Daleks Player's Guide will launch 'soon'. A NEW COMPANION...

www.enworld.org

 

[tetrasodium]

I think this is the greatest strength of the 5th Edition rules. Earlier editions already tried the "a rule for everything" approach, and it ended up being far too cumbersome for me and my friends. The density of the rules was why we dropped 3.X/Pathfinder.

I think that 3.x/PF get trashed too hard on this front* when being compared to 5e. Take the cleric(lets call him bob) growing a church example that keeps going around & extend it for something trivial like Bob the cleric trying to Convince the local Dule to bankroll the stuff the magic items party will need to go exterminate the badThings in the nearby EvilMountain. In 5e Bob can ask for advantage and that's it. In 3.x "bonus types & dm's best friend" allow bob to point out the size of his church for a +2 circumstance bonus, the fact that his flock did most of the work on the city's new walls for another +2, the fact that along with Alice & Chuck they helped LadyNPC clear up her debt problem with the duke when they took care of her possession issue suggesting they have already made him a lot of money for maybe another +2 & so on.

That might be a bit stretched by trying to use the example a lot rather than inventing new ones, but the swing from a chandelier to attack the bad guy comes up all the time with the praises of advantage/disadvantage, but it too perfectly shows the weakness because advantage & your done is different from "lets all work together to make sure bob's big thing cripples the bad guy successfully" stacks.


Yes there were areas they went too fsar at times, but there were areas they did much better than 5e too.

 

[CleverNickName]

Sorry for the separate post, but it occurred to me that 5e is being lauded here for what it doesn't do at all but instead makes the players figure out, and that seems amusing.

For the most part I agree, except the burden of "figuring it out" rests on the DM, not the players. And I prefer it that way.

 

[Hussar]

@Ovinomancer - it appears that we're just talking past each other now because I have no idea why you think I'm not agreeing with you.

It's time for me to unsubscribe from this thread because, honestly, it's not going anywhere and it's just retreading the same things over and over again. AFAIC, the point has been pretty clearly demonstrated that D&D is mostly about combat. Which was the basic question.

Thanks for the convo folks.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm not saying it doesn't work. It works just fine. But if that was the game in its entirety, it would be dull. D&D is not dull. Why? Because it has this whole combat area that has tons of cool stuff to do.

The skill system as designed... meaning in conjunction with the combat rules.... works as intended. To be quick and to get out of the way.



Then don't comment. You've snipped my responses plenty. If you have nothing to say about a given part, then just skip it instead of posting anything like the above. You've already been asked to not make things personal. I haven't called you tedious or anything like that.



I didn't put words in your mouth. I asked you a yes or no question. You responded and didn't clearly say yes or no, but it seemed like you were agreeing. If that's not the case, then feel free to answer clearly and then explain.



I'm not dismissing anything about anyone's preference. You can like what you like and so can anyone else, and that preference is no more or less valid than mine.

I'm not disagreeing with anyone's preference. I'm disagreeing with the assessment that the D&D rules are not mostly about combat.



What RPG that you know of doesn't include improvisational roleplay?



Okay, let me put it in a different way. Where would you say the stakes are highest? What pillar of 5e play?



No, you wouldn't. You'd need to reskin some things and make some tweaks, sure, but you wouldn't have to ditch nearly as much. Star Wars is a fantasy story, despite the sci-fi veneer. A lot of the classes and class abilities and feats would still pertain. You wouldn't have to look at the game and say "wow, we picked a property that really doesn't focus on what this game does well.... we're gonna need to make some major changes".

So attack bonuses and saving throws and AC and Hit Points and so on would function exactly as always. Many class abilities would still be in play because they would fit right into what will come up in Star Wars just as readily as they fit what comes up in D&D. Many feats. You'd lose most spells except those that would make sense to map to Jedi abilities.

Star Wars for 5e makes a lot more sense than Dr. Who, and would require a lot less effort to convert.



Ha sure it is.

The character sheet is a distillation of the game to its most relevant bits for reference in play. Character sheets tell us A LOT about a game.

You know what, I think the answer here is to just remember to not engage with you or aldarc on this topic or ones like it. Most other threads, I enjoy reading your posts.

So, I’m going to disengage. We both know that we disagree on every single thing relating to the topic more specific than “these games are fun”.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

it's been clearly shown that other systems DO.

No, it hasn’t. You’ve just repeated it a lot.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

"As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in Chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure." (DMG, p. 261)

So, depends on the lock, and the circumstances, but the system provides the principles to make quick and effective decisions like that.

But don’t you know that only very specific prescriptive rules count? Everything else just, might as well not exist!

 

[Maxperson]

I mean, if I was that into combat, I wouldn't play D&D, I'd bust out the D&D Adventure board game. It gets more to that point, if desired.

I miss the 3e D&D Minis game. Tons of fun to draft packs and then hold a group tournament.

 

[Oofta]

Not really. If you don't like my example, pick anything else that is not combat related. If I want to convince the town to take up arms against that vampire in the castle, torches and pitchforks style mob, D&D really isn't going to help me much here. Whereas there are lots of other systems that will.

If I want to know how many times I have to stab a dragon with a dagger to kill it, D&D will answer me perfectly. If I want to know how to determine if that princess falls in love with the PC, D&D will not help me at all.

The point is, the system doesn't care. The system doesn't really care about anything that isn't combat related. It's not about what I want in the system (frankly, I don't really want a romance system in the game, but, I do know that they do exist in other games). It's about what the system can ACTUALLY do. When the system cannot answer questions about anything outside of combat, that's not a feature of that system. @Oofta keeps repeating that it's not there because we don't need it. That doesn't actually answer the point though. The point being the SYSTEM, is focused, incentivises and rewards combat to the point of virtually excluding anything else.

Heck, how much XP does my rogue get for picking a lock? If my rogue kills an orc, he gets better at lock picking. But, he picks a million locks and gets no better.

THAT'S how combat focused the game is.

No matter how much you YELL, it doesn't make your opinion any more valid. Does the princess fall in love with the PC? Does the town agree to help? I'd rather have thought and intelligence, a DM, behind that story not some table in a book or rote system.

As far as modules go, I don't use them for my home game so I can't really say much. Back when I did run public games (pre 5E) they did include details about personality and motivation. I assume they still do.

The thing is, you don't need a ton of text with that. What you need is a who's who, what their motivation and goals are. The latest Strixhaven module can apparently be completed without a single combat.

The system doesn't directly reward people for out of combat activity. If non combat activity is not it's own reward in your games I'm sorry. It is for us and always has been. The books contain plenty of support for things outside of combat. It's just not hard rules like you seem to want.

 

[Maxperson]

The density of the rules was why we dropped 3.X/Pathfinder.

Hopefully not on someone's foot.

 

[Cruentus]

Well, there you go: you can have just one or two, because they are meant to be wacked by the PC action economy by design. I would call that stretching it out, just going by the rules as written. If you want a long combat, as you seem to, you can: but that is dragging it out. The usual idea isn't for a single encounter to be an obstacle that takes a long time, but a string of quick and dirty encounters will wear down a party.

We haven't found that to be the case. Quick encounters get met with Cantrips and the least expenditure of resources as possible. To actually get PCs to use resources, then the challenge needs to be higher than CR would indicate, then the combat slows down. Otherwise, focus firing down one or two monsters in a "quick" encounter does absolutely nothing for wearing out a party, no matter how many get thrown at them. "Just use Cantrips" (or other non resources actions) is the frequent refrain. I mean, I can certainly have them be beaten in 1-2 rounds, but then there is less than zero threat to the party, so why bother - no tension, no story, just wacking monsters. Yawn. But DnD certainly isn't about combat, no sir. Just 6-8 "per day" to "wear them down". Shrug.

I guess our table's experience must just be so far out on the fringes of most tables... I don't know.