D&D General Ranking the Pillars of Play

[CleverNickName]

Theory: amount of control is proportional to the amount of satisfaction.

In my experience, players tend to have more control over the Combat pillar and the least amount of control over Exploration...so players tend to enjoy combat scenes quite a bit, and really hate having to 'waste time' disarming traps, solving riddles, and searching for secret doors.

Dungeon Masters are the inverse: they have the least amount of control over Combat and the most control over Exploration...so DMs tend to enjoy hiding things and inventing stuff for the players to solve, and see combat as something that slows (or even prevents) the party from 'making progress.'

And both sides of the table seem to have about the same amount of control over the Social pillar, so they tend to shrug at it. "Sure, we can talk to those guards, maybe try to bribe them...but if I get bored, I'm going to start stabbing them."

 

[Weiley31]

I wonder if opinions of the social pillar will change once Strixhaven comes out.

Probably not, but at least its something. The only other route would be Adventures in Middle-Earth 5E and....well that's a bit hardish to get at the moment.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I like exploration the most, then combat and lastly social. Unfortunately, 5E is too rules light to do justice to the exploration pillar without it just becoming mostly narrative.

 

[Lanefan]

I voted "equal" but that's not quite true; different pillars are more important at different times, in different adventures, and-or when playing different characters.

There's also the fourth pillar they forgot to include - Downtime - which is also important.

 

[ad_hoc]

I have found that people think of exploration differently.

To me it is everything in the game that isn't combat, social interaction, or leveling up and restocking supplies and such.

Everytime the party goes to a new place that is exploration.

It is the most important part of the game for me. I would not be into standing around and talking or fighting.

 

[overgeeked]

In the three-pillar setup, combat is self-explanatory, social is interacting with PCs and NPCs, and exploration is everything else. With that in mind, I rated them: Exploration > Social > Combat.

Exploration is everything that’s not murder and talking. So like 90% of what you’re doing in most non-combat or non-intrigue focused games. So that wins, easily.

Interaction is all the talky bits, which can be great or can be an utterly pointless waste of time. Interesting information gained, win. RP through the minutiae of every shopping trip, yawn. Middle of the pack.

Combat has the most rules, is the most restrictive, and the most boring part of the game. The game would be better without all the rules focus and page count. Dead last.

 

[payn]

I voted "equal" but that's not quite true; different pillars are more important at different times, in different adventures, and-or when playing different characters.

I was going to post this. So, I agree with you here but...

There's also the fourth pillar they forgot to include - Downtime - which is also important.

...You lost me here.

 

[Lanefan]

I was going to post this. So, I agree with you here but...

...You lost me here.

The concept of a Downtime pillar came up tangentially during a massive thread in here a year or so back around the relevance/importance of the Exploration pillar. Some of us realized that most if not all downtime activities don't fit at all well into the three existing pillars, and that a fourth pillar might make sense; I thought this was a great idea and have been advocating for it ever since.

 

[Charlaquin]

I voted exploration > combat > social, though if it was an option I think exploration > combat = social would more accurately express my feelings on the matter. The way the game actually defines exploration, basically everything you do in the game is exploration, so I think it’s pretty clearly the most central pillar. Combat and social interaction are both subsets of play, which I think are of equal importance to play, but if I had to rank one over the other, I suppose I would put combat higher because it has a more robust mechanical framework, and because social interactions often end up very meandering if DMs don’t take care to include dynamic conflict in social scenes, where combat kind of includes dynamic conflict by definition.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Killing Bards > Finding Bards > Talking to NPCs to discover the locations of Bards.

Q.
E.
to the D(ead Bard).