What is your campaign balance? Combat vs Social?

[generic]

I start by fully admitting I hate characters that are uber optimized. Yes everyone is allowed to play any way they want, but I dislike when players do pure character optimization for combat. I find it very one dimensional and it turns DnD for a ROLE Playing Game to a combat board game. If that is how you want to play then just go buy a bunch of WH40K minis and play a pure math and combat game.

This brings me to my question. How do you balance your campaign? If your campaign is just a massive dungeon crawl then being 100% combat is the way to go, but a role play game should have balance. So how should a standard game be balanced? 50% combat 50% social interaction? Do you favor one over the other?

How much social do you think a campaign needs so that players who make balanced characters are happy and pure combat monsters are gimped enough to feel like they shoehorned their character by their choices?

Well...

Now that people are mentioning exploration, I'm able to give my revised results:

50% Combat

15% "Pure" Exploration

35% Social

Furthermore, I agree with [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION], you shouldn't alienate a group of individuals in your OP simply because you dislike their play style.

Personally, I greatly enjoy strategic RP, exploration, and social RP, as well as combat. People can have varied tastes, and some may like mathematical strategy more than you do.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Social encounters don't kill characters. Poorly optimized characters and bad dice rolls kill characters.

But here's the thing: D&D is heavily focused on combat. There are more rules and options for players dealing with combat than anything else. So why should you expect focus elsewhere? Combat options are usually much more interesting than the non-combat ones. If your games are going to focus differently, then players need to be aware of this. Then when they still optimize their characters for battles that seldom occur and have few opportunities to be useful in the game, they have no one to blame but themselves. Consequently, they may also start looking for another group more in line with their preferred style of play.

 

[Sleepy Walker]

I like to present a well rounded mix of things for my players to do. The big issue is that while I am passible at roleplaying, my campaign is rather expansive and I have generated so much content that it is actually a bit difficult to remember how I had everything. Going by the seat of my pants works decently, but I find that I stumble a lot and I feel it detracts from the experience. For example, generating a few handfuls of NPCs for each city to give it life and a unique flavor takes a decent amount of time and if I misplace the paper or did not get it digitized it goes from a fun experience to just OK.

My strengths are in plot interactions, location interaction, and unique situations to make the players think. Defiantly a weakness in roleplay, but despite that there has been little combat compared to different situations, like burning a lot of spell slots was required to save a dying NPC or building up an underground empire. (both not required, but still done)

I would say my campaign so far has been 30% combat, 30% upkeep/city life, 40% adventure/dungeon crawl with no combat.

 

[Zardnaar]

Vary s by the session but generally about 30% social and heavily on exploration or combat with the occasional 100% social game.

Megadungeons are rare, exploration is fairly common.

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

It's been said but it bears repeating: D&D is, at its core, designed primarily for a group of adventurers to beat the piss outta monsters. Can you do the whole court drama thing? Sure. But the game promotes more combat than social. Heck, if I had to break it down I'd say 60% combat, 25% exploration (includes anything from checking the dungeon corridors for traps, to finding the seedy tavern in a new town), and the rest is social stuff.

That's not how ALL my games run though. I've had it where my players didn't roll a single combat related roll in 3 hours of play. But mostly, and I'd be confident speaking for most who play this game, the emphasis is on combat because that's what D&D is at its core.

 

[Immortal Sun]

I'd say 75/25 sounds like my usual split. I have few players who enjoy social events and tend to respond to problems that can't be solved with weapons by just ignoring them. The only answer to that was to make impassable non-combat events, which I don't like doing. Sure, they miss out on a lot of stuff, but they don't seem to mind.

Also, the last Bard I had absolutely decimated social events, so...there's more than one kind of combat, and plenty of kinds of optimized monsters.

I generally try to weave social and exploration into combats. Exploration as a result of chases. The Bad Guy gets talkative while fighting the party, stuff like that.

 

[Iry]

60% Social.
20% Exploration.
20% Combat.

But it also heavily depends on where the characters go. If they decide to delve into a dungeon, things are going to lean heavily on the combat and exploration side of things. But the default tends to be more political and social when they are spending time in major cities (which they do most of the time).

And to be fair, since we lean social we tend to play non-D&D games more often.

 

[S'mon]

This is terrible advice for anyone looking to run a dungeon crawl.

My megadungeon campaign is about 50% exploration, 40% combat and 10% social interaction and it has been an exceptionally fun roleplay game.

I hope nobody adopts your 100% combat suggestion.

Yeah, my Stonehell dungeon crawl is about the same %s as yours. The only time I've seen "100% combat" was when running 4e "Dungeon Delve" scenarios, which are just linear sequences of three fights.

 

[Hussar]

Depends on what we’re playing.

Our Storm King’s Thunder game is primarily combat. Probably 60:20:20 split between combat, exploration and social.

OTOH, our Dragon Heist game is reversed. 60% social with exploration and combat eating up the remaining time.

 

[Maxperson]

Social encounters don't kill characters. Poorly optimized characters and bad dice rolls kill characters.

Social encounters kill lots of characters. There have been many poor social interactions with people and creatures more powerful than my group that have gone badly. Some of those resulted in PC deaths. And optimization is less important than most optimizers think. The game is designed around non-optimized PCs, so while it becomes easier for optimized PCs, optimization is not required to easily survive the game.

But here's the thing: D&D is heavily focused on combat. There are more rules and options for players dealing with combat than anything else. So why should you expect focus elsewhere?

Because I'm not mistaking all the extra rules for combat as meaning the game should revolve around combat. The extra rules are there because combat is much more complicated than exploration and social interaction, so it needs all the extra rules and abilities to be able to handle it, not because the game should be mostly combat.

Combat options are usually much more interesting than the non-combat ones.

This is your personal choice, not one the game is making for you. If you like to play a mostly combat game, that's great. For my part, I understand that the pillars are equal, and therefore strive to give them equal time in my game.