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

 

[payn]

Im starting to think that 5E skill system (Which I have never liked) being too simplified is a cause of a lot of my gear grinds.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Building on this with my own thoughts:

I don't think DnD needs or wants a social conflict mechanic per se. The rare social challenge scene would be a good example case for a generalized skill challenge system.

I do think DnD needs a generalized skill challenge system. I'm not enamored with the existing official options, but a good one would be very good to have.

This is a much better example of a specific scene/challenge mechanic that should exist, at least as an option in the DMG or similar book. Journeys aren't just skill challenges any more than combats are.

These are things that I also think would be very useful. Some of them, could be very empowering to DMs and player.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

“One of the many novelties of this adventure is that the characters can accomplish their goals without resorting to violence—but only if they're clever. They can fight their way through the adventure as well, but the odds won't always be in their favor.” WBtW, p4

So either the designers know what the word novelty means or they don’t. I’m going to assume they do know what the word means, considering they are, in fact, professional writers.

So, you just refuse to recognize that differences of scale exist? Or that novelty isn’t binary?

You suggested extreme novelty. That isn’t the case.

And again, none of this means that the game is “90% combat”. It means, at most, that the adventures have so far been designed to require some amount of combat in order to complete by the book. Heck, it doesn’t even “prove” that the adventures are 90% (or even 50% or more) combat. It literally only shows that previous adventures requires some amount of combat. That’s it.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't think there is a perfect answer. Personally I want proficiency and ability scores to matter outside of combat. But I also want to balance it out and not reward just that.

So how I handle it is to have people explain what they're doing however they want. If it's a social situation, most of the time I want them to interact in first person, I enjoy it more. But if they're not comfortable with that, they can just tell me what argument they're trying to make. Either way I'll do my best to base the target DC (which will be adjusted and may go from automatic to virtually impossible) on the substance of what they say and anything else that may factor in such as interactions.

The problem with skill challenges as used was that there was none of that. The DCs were largely set in stone and nothing you said or did really mattered. Make a truly convincing case? At best you get two successes and someone else had to make further successes using a different skill.

If the decisions you make, if what your PCs say or do are meaningless and the only thing that matters is rolling a D20 and adding a modifier, it's roll playing. Now, maybe that's okay for some people. But in our games? Especially in LFR? Too often it was go around the table and the person with the highest modifier rolled. No creativity, no alternatives, just roll the dice and hope you get the requisite successes before exceeding the failure limit.

I'm not saying there's a perfect solution. I keep a list of what people are proficient at and try to throw situations where they're useful now and then. Whether it's setting up a scenario where the fighter has to lift the portcullis using athletics while the warlock tries to distract the guard or the wizard tries to decipher the arcane writings on a map while the monk uses their cartography skills to determine a precise location. Sometimes I'll use a skill challenge structure. But if someone comes up with a really cool solution, probably something I didn't think of, they just succeed. Maybe with a role, maybe not.

So my preference is to leave it more open with options as described in The Role of the Dice in the DMG so groups can do what makes sense for them.

This seems to have misunderstood how 4e presented skill challenges after PHB/DMG 1. In the PHB/DMG1, they did a very bad job of explaining skill challenges, so confusion if you stopped there is okay. But that means that we need to make sure that we only ever talk about any edition of D&D considering only the initial triad of books, to be fair.

Later books made it pretty clear that you're supposed to absolutely follow the players and that fail forward was the default. GMs were expected to provide a list of actions that they thought worked not as a constraint, but an aid -- these things definitely progress the skill challenge. Nothing anywhere in 4e -- even in PHB/DMG1 -- ever suggested that you couldn't improvise things.

I mean, that system was over a decade ago and there was a lot of intentional misrepresentation during the edition wars. Mistaking how skill challenges worked was a terribly easy thing to do.

 

[overgeeked]

So, you just refuse to recognize that differences of scale exist? Or that novelty isn’t binary?

You suggested extreme novelty. That isn’t the case.

And again, none of this means that the game is “90% combat”. It means, at most, that the adventures have so far been designed to require some amount of combat in order to complete by the book. Heck, it doesn’t even “prove” that the adventures are 90% (or even 50% or more) combat. It literally only shows that previous adventures requires some amount of combat. That’s it.

I've already responded to this elsewhere in the thread.

Which means that you have to assume that the designers of the game are designing adventures almost exclusively for the combat pillar of the game when they believe that the game is not almost exclusively about combat, i.e. they’re bad designers. Good designers are not going to almost exclusively focus their adventures on only one of three equal pillars of play…to the point where having non-combat resolution is called out as a novelty. If they honestly thought their game wasn’t mostly about combat, they wouldn’t have produced X modules that focus almost exclusively on combat. That’s bad design.

And that’s the distinction I made in the first reply to the thread.

The game mechanics are mostly about combat.

The game as most often played is not.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Im starting to think that 5E skill system (Which I have never liked) being too simplified is a cause of a lot of my gear grinds.

To me, this is the single biggest area of potential group incompatibility. If the 5e skill system feels like it was designed “wrong” to a given player, they are never going to have the same play experience as someone for whom it feels like the best iteration of skills in a D&D so far.

For me, the 5e skills are exactly right. Making them more detailed or specific would decrease their utility, IMO.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

This seems to have misunderstood how 4e presented skill challenges after PHB/DMG 1. In the PHB/DMG1, they did a very bad job of explaining skill challenges, so confusion if you stopped there is okay. But that means that we need to make sure that we only ever talk about any edition of D&D considering only the initial triad of books, to be fair.

Later books made it pretty clear that you're supposed to absolutely follow the players and that fail forward was the default. GMs were expected to provide a list of actions that they thought worked not as a constraint, but an aid -- these things definitely progress the skill challenge. Nothing anywhere in 4e -- even in PHB/DMG1 -- ever suggested that you couldn't improvise things.

I mean, that system was over a decade ago and there was a lot of intentional misrepresentation during the edition wars. Mistaking how skill challenges worked was a terribly easy thing to do.

I was a fan of 4e but I could never get my head around how skill challenges were supposed to work. They never sat right with me.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Building on this with my own thoughts:

I don't think DnD needs or wants a social conflict mechanic per se. The rare social challenge scene would be a good example case for a generalized skill challenge system.

I do think DnD needs a generalized skill challenge system. I'm not enamored with the existing official options, but a good one would be very good to have.

This is a much better example of a specific scene/challenge mechanic that should exist, at least as an option in the DMG or similar book. Journeys aren't just skill challenges any more than combats are.

The conflict between social resolution mechanics and D&D is not one of roleplaying, but rather one of control. If the GM is perfectly fine letting players direct the direction of play, then a mechanic is useful -- it resolves whether or not this interaction is one where the players get what they want or if it's one they don't and instead suffer a consequence. If there's a story, though, or a plan, or the GM has an idea they want to have happen with this guy, then such mechanics become a hinderance -- they reduce the ability of the GM to direct.

Note I'm not saying one of these is better or worse than the other -- that's up to individuals to determine their preference for themselves. I can defend the latter -- GM control is important if you do have a story to tell (and that's not a bad thing at all) and for things like pacing and balance of encounters, or if social engagements are not meant to be the primary flux of the game. Also, games like 5e actively punish "winging it" or letting play determine itself, because it serves no assistance to the GM to quickly be able to follow such play but rather works better when the GM has a strong framework of prep, including NPC motivations and activities.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Which means that you have to assume that the designers of the game are designing adventures almost exclusively for the combat pillar of the game when they believe that the game is not almost exclusively about combat, i.e. they’re bad designers.

Doesn’t follow.

Good designers are not going to almost exclusively focus their adventures on only one of three equal pillars of play…to the point where having non-combat resolution is called out as a novelty.

Few 5e adventures are purely combat. In fact, I doubt any are. They all require some combat, but how much combat is assumed by the adventure varies, and even the most violent adventures also require exploration and interaction.

But even if the adventures were 90% combat, that wouldn’t mean anything like what you’re claiming.

If they honestly thought their game wasn’t mostly about combat, they wouldn’t have produced X modules that focus almost exclusively on combat. That’s bad design.

No, it isn’t. They also didn’t do that, but it would just have been a design you dislike.

And that’s the distinction I made in the first reply to the thread.

The game mechanics are mostly about combat.

The game as most often played is not.

Okay. But they aren’t. Every single aspect of the game’s player options has significant non-combat design space. The rest of the mechanics are also a mix. At most, it might be accurate to say that the monster mechanics are 90% combat. And a weakness of 5e is monster design specifically because the combat/non combat ratio doesn’t match the rest of the game, leaving NPCs nearly useful in the other pillars, and leaving PCs just vastly out of the league of most NPCs of appropriate CR for combat.

But that dynamic couldn’t be the case if the game mechanics were actually combat.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I was a fan of 4e but I could never get my head around how skill challenges were supposed to work. They never sat right with me.

There's a trick to them -- you let go. If you're putting a skill challenge out there with a planned outcome, they chafe. If you try to squeeze a skill challenge into a space, but don't let there be enough space, they chafe. Mainly, every single action in a skill challenge needs to advance the fiction directly. You make a check, things change. Not numbers, or the tally, but the fictional situation. Successes move towards the goal, or encounter new obstacles. Failure moves away, adds complications, or inflicts consequences like loss of healing surges, but each and every one of these needs to be shown in the fiction, and that fiction need to be moving and evolving. I prefer to use story now approaches for skill challenges, but you can prep them out with a branching node map. You might have some issues if players go offscript with this, though.