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

 

[Scott Christian]

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.

This is great advice for 5e's system.

Part of some players' conflicts often come from the DM arbitrarily asking for skill checks, and never really having a firm DC in mind and/or never really having the striation you mention here. Any type of lore checks, be it history, religion, arcana, etc are the absolute worst with this, especially if the DM is not proficient, prepared, or has a tough time letting the fiction fall forward using impromptu skills.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Somehow this is far more easily accepted in combat or when magic is involved.

The things you can't do for real whilst sat around a table...

 

[Iamoutofhere]

What is that? I would say there is no such thing as "standard" D&D.

Did you talk it over with your DM first? One of the roles of the DM it to adapt the content to suit the players.

A standard game of D&D….involves Dungeons….and….Dragons

I did indeed talk it over with the DM. I said…I want to play a pacifist gnome wizard…they said..’okay’

 

[UngeheuerLich]

The things you can't do for real whilst sat around a table...

Mysterious, isn´t it?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Heh... I think the easiest way to determine what is truly the most important part of a game is to see what the major complaints about it are. And in D&D... the one thing that is the hallmark of most complaint threads are those parts of the game that are "overpowered" and "underpowered" and what they are related to. That tell us exactly what people are finding truly important in the game, because the rules are messing those parts up.

And I think we can ALL* agree that what is considered overpowered and underpowered are those parts of the game related to combat.

(*"ALL" is a slight exaggeration.)

What do people hate about the Ranger? Hell... it's because the two main abilities they get at 1st level are EXPLORATION related and NOT combat! And thus the class "sucks". Every other class gets combat-related bonuses, but the Ranger doesn't. Thus the class is "underpowered" from the get-go. And we have spent almost eight years bemoaning that fact, and people writing up all kinds of "fixes" for the Ranger for that. And yet some people are making the case that combat isn't really the focus of the game? Really? Then why all the complaints that two abilities for a pillar outside of combat make the class "worse"? Enough so to constantly keep harping on it!

As another example... what are the feats that are "overpowered"? Hmm... let's check. Oh yeah, the combat ones-- Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter. Every single time we talk about feats, it's always about how those two feats screw everything up, and need to be removed from the game, or that the game has to divide feats into two pools-- combat-related and non-combat-related in order to make things "balanced". Because apparently the combat-related feats are just too good and too important. And even the one "overpowered" feat that we could possibly make the case isn't directly combat-related-- Lucky-- just so happens to work for all rolls in the game. And since more dice rolls occur during combat than in either of the other two pillars put together, Lucky might as well be considered a combat feat too based on the number of times it'll be used to re-roll combat rolls versus social and exploration.

If there was even half as many complaints related to "game balance" in the rules for the Exploration and Social pillars as they is for all the combat-related balance issues... maybe the case could be made that this isn't a combat-facing game. But there aren't. The closest thing we get to balance complaints for those other two pillars are the occasional thread about how the Fighter could get another Tool or a couple more skills. That's it. That's the big complaint about those two pillars... a single Tool or Skill can fix the problem. And I would hazard a guess that if a single additional skill is all that is needed to put those two pillars back into balance, it's probably because the rules are not all that extensive and important enough to warrant the kind of vigorous number-crunching that our Combat pillar gets.

Give me a half-dozen threads about the white-room CPR (Conversations Per Round) analysis of the game's Social pillar discussing whether the game is out of whack... and then maybe I'll believe you when you tell me that Combat isn't the primary focus of D&D.

 

[Jer]

There was a time when the D&D rules were all about combat - that time has passed. The 5e rules are probably the least combat focused rules for D&D that the game has had. And while back in the BECMI days we could have sessions where no combat happened it was because we weren't engaging with the rules - we were doing our own drama bits or investigative bits and leaving the rules aside. Now there are actual ways to engage in non-combat scenarios that don't involve setting the rules aside and going into full on dramatic mode or doing an investigation in what was essentially a tabletop point and click adventure game mode (let's look in the desk - oh we found some papers, let's ask Old Man McGruff about the papers, etc.).

My weirdness with the idea of a Doctor Who D&D has nothing to do with that, it's just that classes and levels seem like a very weird fit to me for a setting like Doctor Who. However this weekend I talked to my 14 year old and they saw nothing wrong with it - as they told me, most computer games have levels, and they figured as long as they came up with classes that fit the setting it could be interesting. So I've moved from skeptical to cautiously optimistic. The names involved are quite good and I'll probably pick it up once it drops.

 

[Oofta]

So I was curious (and only half awake this morning) so I did a quick analysis of the PHB to see how much of the book was dedicated to combat. This is not scientific by any means, just kind of an educated SWAG. I did a page count by chapter and then made an estimate of how much of the book was dedicated to combat. Some chapters were 0% combat related like "Personality" while others "Combat" were 100%. I kind of did a rough count for things like equipment which I set at 50%.

The result? Roughly 50% of the PHB is specifically dedicated to combat, not 90%. Almost done with my tea, but I suspect the numbers would be the same or less for the DMG.

My guesstimates:

Spoiler: Chapter, Page Count, Percentage Combat

Chapter	Pages	%Combat
Intro & Preface	8​	5​	0.4​
1: Step-By-Step Characters	5​	5​	0.25​
2: Races	25​	5​	1.25​
3: Classes	44​	50​	22​
4: Personality	20​	0​	0​
5: Equipment	20​	50​	10​
6: Customization	7​	95​	6.65​
7: Ability Scores	6​	50​	3​
8: Adventuring	6​	0​	0​
9: Combat	9​	100​	9​
10: Spellcasting	4​	75​	3​
11: Spells	78​	75​	58.5​
Appendix	22​	50​	11​
	254​		125.05​

​

 

[Jer]

Give me a half-dozen threads about the white-room CPR (Conversations Per Round) analysis of the game's Social pillar discussing whether the game is out of whack... and then maybe I'll believe you when you tell me that Combat isn't the primary focus of D&D.

I mean, it could just be that the social and exploration pillars are well balanced and the combat pillar is where the balanced gets messed up. I actually believe that's probably the case for 5e tbh.

But also theorycrafting on a message board ends up mostly being about the tactical parts of the game because that's where the complexity of the game is. If I start talking about how I think the mechanics around lore checks are busted I'm going to get maybe 2 or 3 people engaging with it because it's not really that hard to rebalance lore checks because they're a simple mechanic that one player usually engages with at a time. There's just not that much complexity there to have an interesting conversation about. Combat meanwhile has a lot of moving parts, and all of the players generally engage with it at once - there's a lot more room for complexity and therefore for things to break or be exploitable because of it. That's going to drive conversations a lot more than a simple mechanic that doesn't have a lot to really talk about regarding it.

(We can argue whether the lack of complexity in a mechanic means that the game isn't focused around that mechanic I suppose. I'd argue that fewer rules are better when roleplaying and that the simplicity around the investigation and social pillars are actually a strength of 5e - adding more rules to those areas would be more likely to make them drag rather than improve the game experience IMO.)

 

[FrogReaver]

So I was curious (and only half awake this morning) so I did a quick analysis of the PHB to see how much of the book was dedicated to combat. This is not scientific by any means, just kind of an educated SWAG. I did a page count by chapter and then made an estimate of how much of the book was dedicated to combat. Some chapters were 0% combat related like "Personality" while others "Combat" were 100%. I kind of did a rough count for things like equipment which I set at 50%.

The result? Roughly 50% of the PHB is specifically dedicated to combat, not 90%. Almost done with my tea, but I suspect the numbers would be the same or less for the DMG.

My guesstimates:

Spoiler: Chapter, Page Count, Percentage Combat

Chapter	Pages	%Combat
Intro & Preface	8​	5​	0.4​
1: Step-By-Step Characters	5​	5​	0.25​
2: Races	25​	5​	1.25​
3: Classes	44​	50​	22​
4: Personality	20​	0​	0​
5: Equipment	20​	50​	10​
6: Customization	7​	95​	6.65​
7: Ability Scores	6​	50​	3​
8: Adventuring	6​	0​	0​
9: Combat	9​	100​	9​
10: Spellcasting	4​	75​	3​
11: Spells	78​	75​	58.5​
Appendix	22​	50​	11​
	254​		125.05​

​

Seems to depend on what you classify as combat. For example I read the Adventuring section and see alot of combat there. I read the class section and see more than 50% of combat there. I read the races section and see way more than 5% of combat there.

I think alot depends on perspective. I also think prominence on the page matters. Also repeated reference matters (which happens much more with the combat related bits than the fluff bits).

 

[Oofta]

Seems to depend on what you classify as combat. For example I read the Adventuring section and see alot of combat there. I read the class section and see more than 50% of combat there. I read the races section and see way more than 5% of combat there.

I think alot depends on perspective. I also think prominence on the page matters. Also repeated reference matters (which happens much more with the combat related bits).

We might quibble about some of the percentages, I don't see any way you could get up to 90% unless you say, for example, that all spells are specifically combat related.

There's a lot of things that can be combat related but also have use outside of combat. I'm looking at things that are only [90% or more of the time] useful in combat. You may climb a wall in combat but climbing is not limited to combat.