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

 

[Oofta]

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.

There's been some out-of-game discussion in most groups I've been involved with, including backstory, potential story arcs and "where do you see this character going". But in past interviews they've said they don't discuss upcoming session details ahead of time.

 

[Jer]

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.

IME White Wolf's Storyteller system oversells itself as a narrative system - I haven't played the newest edition yet but the older ones were clunky and depended a lot on ignoring rules to keep the game flowing (much like the AD&D rules of the time did).

Doctor Who has a good system already for it produced by Cubicle 7. It's a simple 2d6 + attribute + skill roll over the difficulty number system. Character creation is skill and talent based, and while I haven't GMed it I have played it and the game flows well through the kinds of things that you'd expect a Doctor Who system to flow well through. It's a very well done game.

But it isn't going to ever have as many potential players as a version of it that uses almost the same mechanics but with a d20 instead of a 2d6.

(Also for as much as groups of gamers tend to love skill based games I do find that casual players tend to dislike them because there are too many choices to make and they don't have the mastery to know what to pick nor do they have the desire to develop it because that's what makes them casual. Skill based games with Templates work better IME for players like that, but classes still seem to work the best for reasons the game designer part of my brain still can't quite pick apart and figure out why).

 

[Ovinomancer]

Right, which was my point about what players can control: Combat (their effectiveness, not the DM's approach to it). The game provides resolution mechanics for all kinds of things, but then sort of waves its hands at it, and offers the DM the ability to do what they want, or "rule" how they want.

Then we descend into how the players and the DM get along: is it cooperative storytelling where the players really aren't in any danger? Is it "DM Adversarial" where the players, in order to survive, need to outwit, and out-RAW the DM (usually some of my players default stance), etc.

But the books can't possibly go into every possible resolution, story hook, or way to approach "soft" mechanics like social and exploration. They're going to by default require the DM to interpret or assign DCs, or select appropriate skills, etc. And that's where the DM A versus DM B comes in.

I don't think there is an answer. I prefer more open ended structures. 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. A couple of my players want specific rules they can hold onto and manipulate, mostly to rein in the DM. LoL

Yup, there's not an answer to this question if you keep the framework where all moments of how the rules apply are up to the GM. You have to change that framework -- the framework that is the source of this -- to address it.

This isn't saying that this approach is bad. Far from it! It is what it is, and it's behind a number of rather successful and one very successful game/franchise. I absolutely use this approach when I run 5e, which I enjoy doing well enough to keep doing it. There are things that are endemic to various approaches, and GM Says is one where the things being discussed are endemic.

 

[billd91]

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.

It could, but it would probably suck. One good reason for relatively detailed combat (not just in D&D but Traveller, CoC, and tons of other adventure games) is detailed, action movie style, combat gives players multiple levels of feedback and options for changing the situation. This is valuable because dying in combat, TPKing in particular, is a good way to completely derail or disrupt a campaign. Boiling that down to a single check is putting a lot of eggs in a single basket.
This isn't as serious a problem with social interaction because it's a lot less likely to TPK or completely blow a campaign's goal with a single interaction (unless the players are being KotDT-level foolish).
With respect to exploration, we've seen progressive movement away from single checks killing PCs in D&D. First, there were saving throws to miraculously survive a deadly gotcha situation, then insta-death effects were de-emphasized in favor of things like stat damage and conditions, and then we added things like fail forward adjudications.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The odd part to me was more that nobody across several years would want to engage with getting easy Inspiration, at a minimum.

It's not easy Inspiration, though. It's only easy if the GM says it is. You only get it if the GM says you do. It may be easy at your, and other tables, but this is NOT a feature of BIFTs inherently. In fact, where it's discussed in the DMG, the GM is provided a number of options for how it works (including however you want) and told they can use it or not. There's no easy Inspiration in BIFTs unless enabled by the GM to be so.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't think there is an answer. I prefer more open ended structures. 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. A couple of my players want specific rules they can hold onto and manipulate, mostly to rein in the DM. LoL

Rep is for everything preceding this. I'm not sure what happened when you played FATE, but this is very far from my understanding and experience with it. And I don't like FATE. I not a fan, but I'd not ever say something like this about it.

 

[billd91]

There's been some out-of-game discussion in most groups I've been involved with, including backstory, potential story arcs and "where do you see this character going". But in past interviews they've said they don't discuss upcoming session details ahead of time.

Yeah, I think it's clear that they spent a lot more time Session Zero-working on their characters in campaigns 2 and 3 than in campaign 1. There's a lot more drama and backstory to work with right from the beginning, whereas they laugh that the characters they came up with in campaign 1 were essentially an evening's quick work.
But it's also equally clear that Matt constantly throws surprises at them, and vice versa.

 

[Ovinomancer]

If our one player (the DM adversary one) ever figured that out.... shudder.

But I also think that the "player input into the fiction" is a sticking point for some of us in the creativity department. Just feed us a module, describe the room, let us bash things and collect loot. That's about how far we get, often, in the "player input into the fiction" side. As DM, I create lots of world, NPCs, settings, but they're all ignored or glossed over.

Its likely the comfort in the "structure" of DnD, if that's a thing.

So, yup, this is a thing. There's an interesting question, here, though, that you might want to ask. I don't have the answer (well, I have my answer) because it's really up to you to investigate and determine for yourself. Here it is: have you stopped to wonder if players aren't that interested in you detailed background because it's just stuff they have to learn and is mostly not that important? If they ignore it, it just fades out, right? What might happen if players got to have this say, got to say things about the setting, and then those things were what the game was about -- they absolutely 100% matter in a strong way? Would that get more interest?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Absolutely all of this. Restrictions can be a spur to creativity (poetic form or musical Conventions for example), which is what I think PbtA has going for it: but it is more restrictive than the free wheeling "Well, you can certainly try" attitude of D&D.

Is it? There's little to no bar to trying things in PbtA. And the "well, you can certainly try" doesn't mean anything much -- the GM is gonna say, and if they've already said no in their head, nothing you do with the try will work. That seems pretty restrictive. Or not any less restrictive.

 

[Glade Riven]

Good roleplaying doesn't require rules, and I've felt with 5e from the beginning has had a much stronger focus on encouraging players to roleplay. I love all those little charts you can pick from/roll on for character back story or motivations (also handy for quickly generating NPCs), even if it sometimes feels like they sacrifice room that in previous editions to be used for world building.