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

 

[Aldarc]

I have players that refuse to engage with stuff like FATE (not that I'm a fan) strictly because the DM can do whatever they want.

Say what now?

 

[Umbran]

Interesting. I had always presumed it was more curated from an editing standpoint than that. *Never have watched it.

Prior to the covid-19 pandemic, the show was livestreamed - no editing possible.

My understanding is that they switched to pre-recording to help handle safety and scheduling when the world just got that much more difficult to work with. But, in that transition, they didn't change the general format.

Now, I cannot say that they don't have discussions about direction before playing - that would be normal with, say, an improve comedy show. But there no sign of outright scripting, and the results are not edited.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

IMHO, this is one reason why I find the idea it gratuitous for the D&D lead to dunk on this sort of low-hanging fruit against Twitter nobodies. It's looking for an easy win on a vague technicality rather than address the underlying sentiment behind the statement. And I don't even see why it was necessary for WotC management to get so aggressively defensive of their 800 lb. Gorilla against such a hyperbolic claim in the first place.

Even if D&D was "90 percent combat" would that stop 5e from being a fun game? Would that make the 800 lb. gorilla any less dominant in the TTRPG jungle?

It’s easy to get snarky when someone is makin false claims about a thing you’ve spent years working on.

And it’s not like he quoted anyone or otherwise used his platform against anyone. He casually snarked about a sentiment he finds silly regarding his work. Seems fair to me.

 

[Cruentus]

Say what now?

Our "forever DM" switched to running FATE, and has tried to explain it to us, and has run us through some examples of play, and so I'm mostly speaking out of ignorance. What I was exposed to wasn't my cup of tea, I couldn't wrap my head around the concepts, or the mechanics that are in the game. And it is pretty different from how DnD, CoC, WHFRP, Stormbringer, Pendragon, and other RPG's I've played, plays.

So it does have structure, and mechanics, but the more vocal of our group see it as "the DM can do what he wants", which is the perception that gets spread around the rest of the group. But its really neither here nor there. I'll stop talking out my rear

 

[UngeheuerLich]

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.

@ranger: no, the two abilities are not in need of fixes, because they are out of combat stuff, but because they are so narrow and "adventure" dependant that they might not come up at all. If they were just "you are better in any enviroment" or "after a few days, you can adept to an enviroment" and "after a few days dealing with creature x, you get your bonus", i guess many people would not complain at all.

@Feats: Actor was the most overpowered feat we experienced in one adventure. It converted many combat encounters into social encounters.

 

[Aldarc]

Our "forever DM" switched to running FATE, and has tried to explain it to us, and has run us through some examples of play, and so I'm mostly speaking out of ignorance. What I was exposed to wasn't my cup of tea, I couldn't wrap my head around the concepts, or the mechanics that are in the game. And it is pretty different from how DnD, CoC, WHFRP, Stormbringer, Pendragon, and other RPG's I've played, plays.

So it does have structure, and mechanics, but the more vocal of our group see it as "the DM can do what he wants", which is the perception that gets spread around the rest of the group. But its really neither here nor there. I'll stop talking out my rear

My groups that I ran it for had the exact opposite reaction. They liked Fate because it puts checks on the GM in the hands of the players while also emphasizing player input into the fiction.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This is just wrong.

Sorry, no it doesn't.

If you seriously think that games like, say, FATE or Blades in the Dark are somehow less free than D&D in play, well, that's an opinion I suppose.

This sort of thing has been floated for years - that the only way to do stuff is free-form and everything else is more limited. It just shows a very great gap in people's knowledge of other systems and how systems work. Seriously. This has never been true. This is only true for players who only play D&D and have virtually no experience with other systems.

Oof. This post is essentially the same exact behavior as what you’re replying to.

BiTD dn pbta games, games that specify more of the action as a result of mechanics, absolutely are restrictive in actual play experience for a lot of people.

In a past thread, I was told repeatedly that D&D is more restrictive because it doesn’t have detailed specific rules for certain things, or prescribed consequences for a lot of stuff. That notion is completely bonkers to me, but at least I can recognize that it isn’t said from ignorance of how D&D works, it’s just a difference of gaming preferences and experiences.

 

[Cruentus]

IMHO, this is one reason why I find the idea it gratuitous for the D&D lead to dunk on this sort of low-hanging fruit against Twitter nobodies. It's looking for an easy win on a vague technicality rather than address the underlying sentiment behind the statement. And I don't even see why it was necessary for WotC management to get so aggressively defensive of their 800 lb. Gorilla against such a hyperbolic claim in the first place.

Even if D&D was "90 percent combat" would that stop 5e from being a fun game? Would that make the 800 lb. gorilla any less dominant in the TTRPG jungle?

This gets me to another point, and I can't tell you how or even if it applies.

I've played lots of other games (RPGs, TTMiniatures, Boardgames, Computer Games, etc.), and in the TT miniatures realm, what I find is that how the "designers" play the game is often different than how the rest of us play. I've seen this particularly in TT miniatures (GW specifically, the 800lb gorilla in that arena). Players complain there about balance, and rules churn, and the ability to easily "break" things, and OP units/models. When pointed out, the response from devs (in the past) has been "But why would you do that?" or "That's not the intent." But it is allowed by the rules. They play a more laid back style, see the rules play out in a different way than many do.

I don't know if that's the case with DnD where the Devs and writers do actually play, but play differently? What would a game or adventure look like from their end? Do they use Feats like Chef, Dungeon Delver, or Linguist? Do they use Feats at all? What's their experience with Twilight Clerics on the table and why wasn't it seen as powerful to them? Etc.

On the other hand, I feel like they've been pretty open about how their tables (Crawford's?) handles certain rulings, but I also wonder how much they play all the stuff they put out there, or is it all reliant on feedback from the playerbase.

 

[Aldarc]

In a past thread, I was told repeatedly that D&D is more restrictive because it doesn’t have detailed specific rules for certain things, or prescribed consequences for a lot of stuff. That notion is completely bonkers to me, but at least I can recognize that it isn’t said from ignorance of how D&D works, it’s just a difference of gaming preferences and experiences.

I'm fine with different sets of gaming preferences about roleplaying; however, I'm not cool with trying to depict giant swaths of other TTRPGs as being about roll-playing and not roleplaying.

 

[Arcaneshield]

Shoving everything into 5e just because it's popular is frankly stupid. Dungeons and Dragons is a system about dungeon crawling. It was designed that way and always has. It's system of race, class, loot, leveling, all of it is designed for a particular kind of game. You can run a story game with little combat in 5e, the question is, why? Unless your world has vancian magic there's really no reason to use 5e over an actual story system aside from its toxic control over the market as the most popular (for reasons that escape me) system. Shoving scifi and everything else under this 5e header reminds me of the heady days of d20 OGL and shoving every setting and world into a dungeon crawling system framework for strange, strange reasons.

Doctor Who would be better served by the storyteller systems ala White Wolf stuff or Shadowrun, or something like Fate Core or something like Savage Worlds or Genesys.