Is D&D Too Focused on Combat?

Dungeons & Dragons' wargame roots are well-known, but what is sometimes forgotten is how much its origins influenced role-playing games. Although D&D has been a platform to tell many different kinds of stories, its mechanics focus on a few core themes and one of them is combat -- but it's not the only one.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

The Three Modes​

Jon Peterson in Playing at the World explained that there are three modes of D&D play, in which dramatic pacing is achieved by transitioning between the three:

...a mode of exploration, a mode of combat and a mode of logistics. Time flows differently in each of these modes, and by rationing the modes carefully a referee guides the players through satisfying cycles of tension, catharsis and banality that mimic the ebb and flow of powerful events.

These modes are interrelated in important ways, and modern role-players tolerance for all three has changed over time. Exploration has experienced a resurgence with sandbox-style play. Combat has been de-emphasized, particularly in story-telling games. And logistics are back in vogue thanks to the Old School Renaissance. Let's take a look at each in turn.

The First Mode: Exploration​

In the original boxed set of D&D, exploration was important, but beyond the scope of the rules. It was a key part of emergent play -- using basic guidelines to encourage creative strategies -- but it wasn't actually part of D&D itself. Instead, D&D encouraged players to buy Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival board game, as Peterson explains:

The object of Outdoor Survival is to navigate a wilderness, though there are five scenarios providing distinct justifications for doing so: for example, lost players returning to civilization at the edges of the map or racing to find the object of a search party. Given that the board itself is not a secret from the players (Outdoor Survival has no referee), some other means is required to simulate being lost in the woods, since the players necessarily command a bird’s-eye view of the environment. Dice therefore determine whether or not players are lost, and if so, in which direction they will wander. The board is overlain with a hexagonal grid, segmenting the board into hexagons about 1.5 centimeters across; as there are six possible directions on a hexagonal board to move, a six-sided die can easily dictate the orientation of lost players. Each hex contains a particular terrain type, in much the manner of Hellwig: there are mountains, swamps, rivers, deserts, plains and even roads (well, trails).

Evidence of D&D's interest in hexcrawling is strongly represented in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, which was published after the original set but before the rest of the AD&D line. Each monster has a few noteworthy statistics, particularly: frequency, number appearing, and % in lair. Much of these stats do not make sense in a typical dungeon context, where the rooms are planned out; DMs would likely know the monsters that were to appear in their dungeons, and in fact author Gary Gygax states, "...It is not generally recommended for use in establishing the population of Dungeon Levels." But when used in hexcrawling they're useful in describing the encounters there, beginning with frequency, then determining if the monster encountered is in its lair, and then concluding with number of appearing (which could sometimes be in the hundreds, befitting a camp but not a dungeon room).

For a time, hexcrawling and emergent play were out of favor as more scripted adventures came into vogue. The OSR has reinvigorated sandbox-style play, in which the players generate the world as they adventure, one roll at a time.

The Second Mode: Combat​

D&D's second mode is the one most gamers are familiar with: killing things. D&D grew out of Chainmail, itself a product of wargaming, so combat's relevance to D&D goes all the way back to its first iteration. Additionally, it mimics the style of the fiction that influenced it, including the violent Conan among other swords and sorcery novels. What's changed is how D&D scales combats. The emphasis on leveling up was treasure, as explained in a previous article, "The Original End Goal of Dungeons & Dragons." Kiva Maginn (Battletech design lead) on Twitter explains how this changes the style of play:

As a player, you could gain experience by fighting monsters or claiming treasure. You could lose it by dying in battle with monsters. You could encounter monsters without treasure, and you could encounter treasure without monsters. So there was an obvious 'best' path. Get in, get the treasure, get out. Do as little fighting as possible, because fighting risks XP loss. Avoid encounters when you can, and subvert them with clever tricks if possible. Money you find without a fight is free XP.

This changed with Third Edition, in which experience points were rewarded for defeating a monster:

Consider 3rd Edition D&D, by contrast. Gold provides no inherent advancement. At a certain point, you simply don't need it anymore. You have so much of it that it's absurd to bother picking up any more. So there's a new obvious 'best' path. Ignore tricks and clever solutions. Never avoid fights. Kill every single monster in the dungeon, with 'it's in the dungeon!' as your justification for doing so. Seek out harder fights with bigger monsters. Don't stop killing.

Ironically, D&D became MORE about killing than less, as PCs were no longer incentivized to just accumulate gold to advance. Third Edition also did away with name levels and retainers as being an end gold, so the purpose of spending gold had shifted from building strongholds and hiring mercenaries to personally enriching the character through acquisition of magic items. This change was a recognition that players were less interested in leading armies and transitioning back to a life of perpetual adventuring, and the game shifted gears to reflect that.

Of course, role-playing has since moved beyond combat -- relying more heavily on the narrativist style of play -- even if it started with the primarily tactical dungeon and overland exploration of D&D.

The Third Mode: Logistics​

Logistics have largely fallen out of favor today due to onerous nature of keeping track of encumbrance, equipment, and gold. These factors were all intentional controls on player greed, ensuring that PCs couldn't just cart out mountains of gold (and thus experience points) without some challenges. You can read a more detailed discussion of inventory management and encumbrance in a previous article, "The Lost Art of Packing it All In."

Third Edition's shift towards combat meant that the nature of logistics changed to be less about accumulating gold and more about personal advancement, exemplified by Pathfinder which spins out even more options than Third Edition for character development.

D&D Today​

So where does that leave us with D&D today? Kiva points out that the combat biases are still there, but now D&D has expanded to encompass other styles of play -- it just doesn't emphasize it equally:

The flaw in later D&D was that it was a game that was good at modeling killing, and spent a decade trying to be anything other than a game about killing.

Inspiration, Personal Characteristics, and Background were added to incentivize players to role-play but as the AngryDM points out, many players forget all about it because of the way it's implemented:

It’s just this thing that’s easy to forget and sits in the game not really doing anything. It feels tacked on. Vestigial. An afterthought. It certainly doesn’t seem to have a clear purpose, as evidenced by the fact that the DM and the players get different advice about it and how it is weirdly disconnected from the mechanics that it seems to be connected to. It seems thrown in. “People like Bonds in Dungeon World and Aspects in Fate, we should probably slap something like that in there.”

Fifth Edition D&D has also changed how experience points are gained, providing an option to level up through milestones instead. This shifts the incentives yet again away from combat.

Is combat overemphasized in D&D? Maybe, but that's at least partially due to the other two modes of exploration and logistics falling out of favor. If the eight pages detailing combat are any indication in the Basic D&D Rules, combat is still an integral part of the game, and many players are just fine with that.

 

[Shasarak]

But I read a lot of posts which talk about leaving all the talking up to "the face". This suggests that situations are being set up so that none of the other PCs (and thereby the players) have anything distinctive at stake which they need to make social checks to achieve. Contrast the situation with combat, where (typically) every PC is at risk of losing hp.

I would imagine that leaving all the talking to the "Face" character would be similar to leaving all the damage taken to the "Tank" character.

 

[Shasarak]

To be more specific:
* The weight of items one can legitimately carry.
* The bulk of items, even if they're light, that can be carried.
* The weight and bulk of coins

There's plenty of tools to keep track of equipment, and my kids are having a blast playing a Minecraft-stye hexcrawl game using a D&D 5E version of Gamma World (and lots of tokens). Logistics is one of their favorite parts of the game. But it's not for everybody, and there seems to be magical banks that just automatically allow exchanges and withdrawals even when PCs aren't near civilization.

So yeah, there are definitely players who consider it onerous and they're not the minority.

I like Minecraft and on the other hand Minecraft logistics are really funky.

View attachment 93531

 

[Kobold Boots]

Eh. 5E could solve it with just one release. It's really not that hard to fully address.

Sure, and Pathfinder fixed a lot with Ultimate Campaign, but that was also four years after the initial game released

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I would imagine that leaving all the talking to the "Face" character would be similar to leaving all the damage taken to the "Tank" character.

In practice, leaving all of the talking to the "Face" character is a lot like leaving all of the lockpicking to the "rogue" character -- it's extremely efficient for everyone concerned.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

So why do we categorize every aspect as combat and non-combat? Why not exploration and non-exploration, etc.? Oh, yeah... Because it is a combat-focused game! It always has been. Every edition, every derivative system. That is the game, and hooray for that because we need/like it that way!

Now what is the point of arguing so strongly against it like it's a bad thing? D&D does what it does best, and can diverse itself just enough to give everyone their favorites on the side. Regardless how you slice it, you're still just rolling a die trying to beat a number to determine a pass/fail situation which is the simplest (and out-dated) mechanic in RPGs. So keep fighting the good fight, I guess.

 

[Manbearcat]

In practice, leaving all of the talking to the "Face" character is a lot like leaving all of the lockpicking to the "rogue" character -- it's extremely efficient for everyone concerned.

There are lots of problems with this Saelorn, not the least of which is how your extreme metagame aversion is incoherent with this position.

1) In reality (you're extremely predisposed toward extrapolation via internal causality), both informal and formal parlay (regardless of stakes and goals) among groups (associates/peers, would-bes, or strangers) typically involves multi-layered interactions. One of the most important in the animal kingdom is unspoken signalling such as postures and respect for courtesies or social norms. For instance, if someone is spoken to and they are ill-equipped to interact or aloof/rude/non-credible in their interactions, it damages the prospects of getting what a side wants out of the interchange. This speaks to both (i) framing (a GM engaging a non-"face" character during interaction) and (ii) lack of consequences/fallout if either the non-"face" character eschews the interaction or the "face" character steps in and denies the NPC their interchange with the other PC. In the real world, that typically doesn't fly and you'll draw the ire of someone ("I was talking to him/her") or they'll lose respect for both parties (due to the beta nature of the former and/or the unsolicited, rude interruption of the latter).

It may be "metagame cozy" to have the face do all the interactions (because of action resolution maths), but that should be a big problem of internal causality for anyone accustomed to varying social interactions in real life. And a GM who is insufficient at framing "non-face" characters into social interaction needs to step their game up. And a resolution system (GMing ethos or mechanics) that doesn't play into this paradigm is also likely a problem.

2) While this won't move you at all, genre fiction (upon which plenty of people draw genre logic inspiration from) isn't exactly starved of tense social engagements with non-specialists (either because they imposed their will upon the situation or the situation was imposed upon them).

 

[pemerton]

Pem - You know I don't mind chatting with you, but if you're going to write a book, at least make an attempt to actually understand what I wrote

THis claim:

At it's core the game has always been, roll a die or dice and try to get over or under a target number. Early on the D20 and D100 were used for task resolution and the others were used mostly for damage. These days it's more about the D20 and hitting a target number threshold. Really, that's as complicated as the game is in a nuts and bolts way and I don't think that ever needs to change.​

is not correct.

The nuts and bolts of D&D combat are not roll to hit a target number. They never have been. (There are games that fit this description: HeroWars/Quest and Burning Wheel, just to give two examples, allow combat to be resolved this way.)

Initiative; position; damage and hit points rules; these aren't add-ons to D&D combat. They're absolutely at it's core.

You can't even begin to work out who won a D&D combat just be finding out who hit how many target numbers.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

There are lots of problems with this Saelorn, not the least of which is how your extreme metagame aversion is incoherent with this position.

It's not metagaming if that's how the world actually works. Your argument basically amounts to saying that the world doesn't really work that way, which may or may not be true of the real world, and may be true in your particular game world, but isn't necessarily true of my game world or any other game world I've ever played in. In most D&D worlds I've seen, you should leave fragile negotiations to the bard or paladin, because any interjection from the barbarian will cause negotiations to fail.

2) While this won't move you at all, genre fiction (upon which plenty of people draw genre logic inspiration from) isn't exactly starved of tense social engagements with non-specialists (either because they imposed their will upon the situation or the situation was imposed upon them).

In genre fiction - depending on what genre you think this is - non-specialists rarely accomplish anything useful through grace or eloquence of speech. More often than not, one side has a trump card which makes negotiation superfluous, or the opponent pretends to be convinced so they can betray the heroes later on in a dramatic fashion. Translating that into D&D terms, the die isn't usually rolled in those situations, or the villain succeeds in bluffing past the nonspecialist's insight.

And that holds in D&D, as well. The barbarian may choose to negotiate with the Big Bad by holding the MacGuffin hostage, or otherwise giving them no choice. You don't need to send in the Face, because skill is a non-factor in this situation.

 

[Lylandra]

And this is why people who love talking the talk as well as fighting the fight tend to invest into diplomacy etc. as much as they'd do in perception. The only problem there is often a lack of skillpoints or available proficiencies. Because I'd love to have each character be able to contribute to social encounters, both in terms of roleplaying AND in terms of mechanics.

And this is where one could argue that D&D is "too combat focused". Because everyone *has* to be able to contribute in a fight and not everyone *has* to be able to contribute in social or exploration situations per RAW.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It may be "metagame cozy" to have the face do all the interactions (because of action resolution maths), but that should be a big problem of internal causality for anyone accustomed to varying social interactions in real life. And a GM who is insufficient at framing "non-face" characters into social interaction needs to step their game up. And a resolution system (GMing ethos or mechanics) that doesn't play into this paradigm is also likely a problem.

I can't say for certain, since you're the one choosing your language, but it sounds to me like you aren't talking about meta-gaming or framing at all. It sounds more like you think the DM is roleplaying their NPCs inauthentically, and that they're getting away with it because there are no system mechanics with which to hold them accountable.

As an example, if the party is in town and the local loan shark starts harassing the fighter over some past debts, you think the fighter shouldn't be able to get away with simply letting the bard handle it; even though the fighter negotiates at -1 and can't possibly bluff, while the bard is absolutely guaranteed to convince the loan shark that the debts had already been paid. Is that an accurate assessment of your position?

Assuming this to be the case (so I can finish my point before going to bed), it sounds like you're confused by the concept of meta-gaming. The colloquial definition of the term refers to a character within the game world acting on information from outside of the game world. If the fighter chose to talk instead of the bard, based on the real-world rules of etiquette, then that would be meta-gaming because the world they live in doesn't actually work that way; only in our world would the fighter feel such a social pressure to speak for themself. Within the game world, allowing the bard to handle it is the correct course of action, because their world really does allow such deflections to be handled in that manner (it all comes down to the skill check, after all).

If you want to say that D&D is too combat-oriented because it has a lot of rules for combat and not enough rules to compel group participation in social interactions, then that's certainly a valid position (and it wouldn't even rely on DM framing to carry out). I would just argue that you could solve this example equally well by nixing the social skills entirely, such that the bard couldn't save the fighter trivially, and the fighter was not mechanically penalized for speaking on their own behalf.