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

 

[FrogReaver]

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.

Weight the things that repeteadly get referrenced by players appropriately higher than the things that players generally read through once or twice. Suddenly you are at 90% or higher combat.

 

[Oofta]

Weight the things that repeteadly get referrenced by players appropriately higher than the things that players generally read through once or twice. Suddenly you are at 90% or higher combat.

Why does that matter? There's more "crunch" for combat because they take a very rules over rulings approach to many things that are not combat. I couldn't begin to guess what percentage is referenced because that's going to vary from individual to individual. My only point was that 90% of the text is not dedicated to combat. A system that needed to be constantly referenced for non-combat activity is not a game I would personally want to play.

 

[FrogReaver]

Why does that matter? There's more "crunch" for combat because they take a very rules over rulings approach to many things that are not combat. I couldn't begin to guess what percentage is referenced because that's going to vary from individual to individual. My only point was that 90% of the text is not dedicated to combat. A system that needed to be constantly referenced for non-combat activity is not a game I would personally want to play.

Presumably if the players are referencing the combat things more it's because those combat things are coming up much more often in their games.

 

[DEFCON 1]

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.

And that's the big question, isn't it? If D&D has much more complexity in its Combat mechanics rather than it's Social or Exploration mechanics... is that because it NEEDS that complexity, or because it WANTS all that complexity and those moving parts to make it more interesting?

Combat COULD be completed with just a Skill check like the Social pillar is if it really wanted it. The player and the DM talk about and narrate their fight (like they would a Social pillar roleplaying conversation)... and then at the end the player rolls a d20 and adds their attack bonus against the monster's AC difficulty class. And if the player rolls higher then the DM narratives the result (like they would after a Persuasion check.) That could easily be D&D if that's what the game thought the importance of combat was meant to be.

By the same token... Exploration and Social COULD have the same amount of game mechanics as combat-- social/discovery "attacks", natural "defenses", "ego" hit points, "ego damage", and all kinds of special abilities to create entirely complex formulas for Exploration "combat" and Social "combat". Heck, some games do that-- as has been mentioned, FATE uses the exact same mechanics to simulate an argument as it does a swordfight. And characters have just as many special features to their characters that help one of them as they do the other.

Does D&D have that? Nope. Why? Because I don't think it sees Exploration and Social as wanting or needing that complexity or engagement in the players as they do Combat. So on the question of why there aren't as many arguments, discussions and threads all about trying to "rebalance" D&D Exploration and Social... while on the one hand you could try and claim that they are both already just so well-balanced that there is nothing needing to be done... on the other side is the claim that neither pillar is just that important to anyone rules-wise that it is worth their time trying to argue, discuss, or fix them. We have some rules for them... we make do with what we have... but they just don't have the same focus in the game.

 

[Oofta]

Presumably if the players are referencing the combat things more it's because those combat things are coming up much more often in their games.

I would say it's because they need details for combat than for general feel and fluff. How often do you need to know the price of trade goods? Once you've read the default assumptions on what dwarves are like, it's not like you need to go back and read it again.

If you count what's referenced outside of spells you're probably talking about 2% of the book.

 

[overgeeked]

Combat COULD be completed with just a Skill check like the Social pillar is if it really wanted it. The player and the DM talk about and narrate their fight (like they would a Social pillar roleplaying conversation)... and then at the end the player rolls a d20 and adds their attack bonus against the monster's AC difficulty class. And if the player rolls higher then the DM narratives the result (like they would after a Persuasion check.) That could easily be D&D if that's what the game thought the importance of combat was meant to be.

I would honestly love that.

 

[overgeeked]

I would say it's because they need details for combat than for general feel and fluff. How often do you need to know the price of trade goods? Once you've read the default assumptions on what dwarves are like, it's not like you need to go back and read it again.

If you count what's referenced outside of spells you're probably talking about 2% of the book.

A lot of that is likely because most things not combat related are most often hand waved. You have combat and spells and conditions, referenced quite often. Equipment and feats a bit less so. The adventuring and ability use and skills a bit less. And everything else almost never. Once to write things down or check when you level, but that’s it.

 

[DEFCON 1]

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.

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I like the fact that you went over this stuff, thank you! But the one thing I thought of about this is the realization that it does not mean that all the pages not about combat are ipso-facto about the Exploration or Social pillars instead. I suspect there's a whole bunch of pages in the book just dedicated to pillar-neutral explanation or instruction.

If you had the time, I'd like to see what the page counts are of each section that is dedicated to what you would consider Exploration and what you consider Social (and thus also giving us the number of pages that are not about any of the three Pillars at all.) Then we could really see what the percentages of the book end up being in total for Combat, Exploration, Social, and the non-pillar general writing. Combat's percentage relative to Exploration and Social could very well go up from the 50% you have it as, once all the non-pillar pages are removed from the math.

 

[overgeeked]

I like the fact that you went over this stuff, thank you! But the one thing I thought of about this is the realization that it does not mean that all the pages not about combat are ipso-facto about the Exploration or Social pillars instead. I suspect there's a whole bunch of pages in the book just dedicated to pillar-neutral explanation or instruction.

If you had the time, I'd like to see what the page counts are of each section that is dedicated to what you would consider Exploration and what you consider Social (and thus also giving us the number of pages that are not about any of the three Pillars at all.) Then we could really see what the percentages of the book end up being in total for Combat, Exploration, Social, and the non-pillar general writing. Combat's percentage relative to Exploration and Social could very well go up from the 50% you have it as, once all the non-pillar pages are removed from the math.

Agreed. At a quick guess, exploration covers the rest of the equipment section. Adventuring is all exploration. Abilities and skills are evenly split. The remainder of the spells are evenly split. Though I would argue the classes and equipment sections are 2/3 combat at least.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I would honestly love that.

And you aren't alone, which is why there are the games out there that don't focus on combat and make it that simple. Heck... a game of Fiasco can have a massive gun-fight played out narratively whose determination of what happens is the main player just being handed a black die or a white die by the other players. The die isn't even rolled! It's just "be given a white die and your scene ends in your favor, a black die says your scene ends in your loss."

But that ain't D&D. It's never been D&D and it ain't ever going to be D&D. And that's why an entire book is given to us all about monster statistics related to their combat skills... because that's where the focus of the game is.