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

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I said that I donunderstand why nobody across 8 years would go for it...but good point, if tables are choosing to specifically not use part of the game, it makes sense. And that's part of the freedom of the system.

Yeah for me, and this is why my own system is built this way, what I want is detailed character creation with a lot of differentiating bits and player agency, and then fairly broadly defined gameplay mechanics that those player bits can hook into, with nuanced consequences for most actions. A skill check in my system will usually have some kind of mixed result, and the character taking the action generally decides the particulars of the consequences, within a suggested framework. This part of the system is similar to the pbta success ladder, but without the semi-prescribed (or hard prescribed IIRC in some pbta games) “moves”.

 

[overgeeked]

This is an interesting mechanic for ability checks - one I'll probably explore further in our games for certain tasks. Thanks for posting it.

Hope it works for you.

Another way to be fair and impartial, IMO, is to use the 5e DMG guidelines on setting DCs (10 = easy, 15 = med, 20 = hard...) and then let the player know the DC you, as DM, are setting before they go through with the roll for the ability check.

To me that is what makes it impartial. That the DM doesn’t decide. It’s randomly rolled. If the DM decides, it is, almost by definition, not impartial.

And, what the heck, tell them the failure and success states for the approach they are proposing.

You should always do that. The player can’t make an informed decision without knowing, at least in broad strokes, about what success and failure will look like.

I find this much more pleasing in game play than what I've often seen from some DMs, which appears to be the equivalent of gauging the DC after the fact: 15+ = success, <10 = failure, 10-14 = pause... as I consider... am I feeling generous... or not?

That’s exactly why I roll. I don’t want to put my thumb on the scale. That’s the opposite of fair and impartial.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Snip

Sounds very intriguing.
Still it is interesting how the game seems as simple in resolving the action as dnd. The main difference is that the DC is set.
The player and DM adjucate the consequences of failure together.

I would play such a system.

 

[blaise hebert]

I'm very late to the party, and someone has probably mentioned this, but you can look at the data to make that call. If you took the basic set of books needed to play, let's say Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manual, and took out all information related to combat, how much of the content would you have left. You could choose either word count or page number to determine how much the game is designed around combat.

The other thing you could use is player data. Didn't Wizards release a whole bunch on data a few years back. You could correlate player choice with intent to play. So if the most popular class was fighter, well, you have your answer...

 

[ad_hoc]

From what I've seen there are 2 major factors that increase the combat in a game:

The combats are easy and so the players don't have incentive to work to overcome them in other ways. So they just fight everything they find because they know they will win.

The table takes a long amount of table time to resolve combats. One poster in this thread said that after level 7 combats take hours. Well no, they don't have to. Most 5e combats should be taking 15-30 minutes. A truly huge and epic combat might take an hour while a small skirmish could be as quick as 5 minutes.

If your combats are taking longer then it will be of great benefit to look into what is going wrong.

 

[Jacqual]

Ya I guess that the game of playing make believe with your friends has extensive rules covering combat whether physical or spell, and the non combat stuff isn't as extensive rules as the result isn't a potential death of a character or NPC or whatever. We need rules so players/DM's don't say things like my awesome death laser attack never misses or fails to kill whatever I attack like when we were kids playing cops and robbers or whatever game we thought of. When players are roleplaying out non combat stuff you don't need a million rules its called being social and talking, but combat needs rules to settle stuff I haven't seen a TTRPG that doesn't have rules covering combat this is I feel a over reaction by a Twitter crowd on something, I am not even thinking of folks in the woke (so please don't think I was going there I'm not) crowd just folks that think they don't want folks playing D&D but some other system instead.

 

[Cruentus]

So, yup, this is a thing. There's an interesting question, here, though, that you might want to ask. I don't have the answer (well, I have my answer) because it's really up to you to investigate and determine for yourself. Here it is: have you stopped to wonder if players aren't that interested in you detailed background because it's just stuff they have to learn and is mostly not that important? If they ignore it, it just fades out, right? What might happen if players got to have this say, got to say things about the setting, and then those things were what the game was about -- they absolutely 100% matter in a strong way? Would that get more interest?

Yup. Asked, tried to get buy-in (in addition to campaign proposal + session zero discussion on game and expectations), tried to get involvement in helping develop that stuff, and...crickets... Could be I've moved on from what some of the players want, could be some of the players want something else but are happy enough to have a game, who knows. Different players have different opinions, but they don't congeal around something that makes everyone happy (particularly not me, the DM), so the loudest players get what they want (Trying to "win" DnD). So I've been doing what the players want, sucking it up about what I was hoping to have be the feel of the game. Its a lot more exhausting doing that, though

I probably just need to find a different group of players or a different group to play in that has some of the same wants/ideas/whatever: low magic, balance of RP and Combat, gritty, with a background/world that you can feel a part of.

But, this is really off the topic of whether DnD is 90% combat. Back to your regular programming!

 

[Jer]

From what I've seen there are 2 major factors that increase the combat in a game:

I mean, you missed one. Which is that the players at the table love combat and are mostly playing to play a combat game.

Having the game be 90% combat isn't actually a bad thing or a good thing - it's a thing. It's only a bad thing if the players at the table actually want the game to be less than 90% combat but for some reason it ends up being 90% or more combat.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Again, so what? A D&D table has the freedom to make anything they want out of the rules, without being limited by a playbook. Some might find the restrictions of the playbook inspiring, and I get that, but it is restrictive.

No, ANY table can make up whatever they want. There's nothing special about D&D that enable you to make stuff up on your own. I don't understand what making things up on your own consistently gets attributed to D&D as if it uniquely allows this to happen. You do it, take pride!

 

[Malmuria]

For social encounters in 5e, a dm can make the dc clear (and there are explicit guidelines in the dmg), establish the stakes of success/failure and possible quality of success before the roll, and engage in dialogue/Conversation with players about how to proceed. It's not that hard. Granted, having all those things wrapped up in the fundamental gameplay loop is nice. But we don't even have to go to story games for this; in CoC you know before your roll the target # and the degree of difficulty because of the way the basic resolution mechanic works.

Combat can feel restrictive because it feels like you have a menu of options and strict rules that govern when and how you can use those options. It's reliable, but comes down to "rulebook says" instead of "gm says" (if we are going to be reductive about it). Plus, there extensive 5e advice about how DMs should roll behind a screen and fudge die rolls (usually in the PCs favor).