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

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't know why equating increased traffic at a temple with cash is crass considering the role of donations in supporting a religion and its ongoing operations. More people = more donations, generally speaking.

Sure. I mean, asking if you can convince people to join the worship of your manifested deity (this is D&D) is only about paying the bills. Cool. How do we establish what the costs for running a church are? Does me making multiple gold pieces of income based on the downtime rules mean I get many 100's of poor followers (needed to come up with that amount), or one noble? Is the answer to that question even something we know how to determine or even know what it means with regard to 5e?

 

[Oofta]

It is my expectation that most people who play RPGs play some flavor of D&D/Pathfinder, and not much else, such that most players don't have experience with extensive social encounter rules.

Your opinion on that may differ. I am not going to argue with you about which of our opinions is correct. That wouldn't be valuable discussion.

You keep asserting this. Which, fine. You like something I don't think I would.

But can you point to a free example of what your talking about? Because some of us can barely scrape together a D&D twice a month and don't have the luxury of playing dozens of different games. Therefore we have to make judgement calls on what we know. So I don't want detailed social rules based on what I have experienced when people tried to implement them.

On the other hand, I don't see why I can't make a judgement call based on my preferences and what people have explained. It's like when friends convinced me to try shashimi* yet again. That I just hadn't tried "the good stuff". No ... I'm just not that fond of fish, I'm not a fan of horseradish and I don't like any meat that's undercooked much less raw. I was right about my preference before I ever tried it the first time, my opinion didn't change the third.

Your comments on this topic tend to come across as condescending. That only you, and the learned others, know what's best for everyone. That it's impossible to make a judgment call on what comes down to a personal preference. I'd be happy to have a discussion on what people could implement in D&D that wasn't just a "It should implement the rules that [insert game I've never played and likely never will] has. You'd like them if you only tried. By the way there's a new restaurant I'm sure you'd love if only you tried it..."

EDIT: I should say that we've had examples like this one from @Manbearcat , which I do appreciate. But based on examples like that, it's not something I would want in D&D. YMMV of course.

*Yes, I know there are many varieties and options. I'm talking about the raw fish version which is what people keep trying to convince me is so awesome because they like it.

 

[billd91]

Sure. I mean, asking if you can convince people to join the worship of your manifested deity (this is D&D) is only about paying the bills. Cool. How do we establish what the costs for running a church are? Does me making multiple gold pieces of income based on the downtime rules mean I get many 100's of poor followers (needed to come up with that amount), or one noble? Is the answer to that question even something we know how to determine or even know what it means with regard to 5e?

Are we talking about social mechanics here or a new game about church administration? This is diverting Hussar's initial question down a rabbit hole. How does one start to figure out how to determine if preaching gets people coming to the temple? Umbran provided a perfectly reasonable suggestion using ideas already within D&D's structure that seems to meet Hussar's criteria - a social mechanic that can be used to provide an answer. He's already open to the idea that various games with social mechanics may handle this with varying degrees of complexity - that D&D is capable of doing this with little complexity and specificity doesn't seem like a problem. It's not a religious organization simulator or economic simulator - it's a framework for playing out pseudo-medieval fantasy stories. Generating x amount of donations over the week for that intervention seems a pretty reasonable way of rating a level of success - it's up to the DM (or player) to interpret that into something more specific (a wealthy benefactor or a lot of peasants) based on how they want the game to be affected.

Are you suggesting that there is a significant RPG market seeking social mechanics that has more specific answers to these questions - such as exactly how many congregants you'd attract with a week's worth of preaching and how much they'd contribute to the budget of the church? Or a game that meets those needs? If not, then I'm gonna say that diverting into a lot of specific "whatabout" tangents is playing shenanigans with the topic.

 

[jinat]

Off the top of my head?

1. Marketing. WotC has spent millions (and lots of millions) in marketing D&D. Something no startup game could possibly match. Doesn't matter how good your game is if no one has heard of it.
2. Tradition - this is enormous. Gamers are INCREDIBLY attached to the game they play.
3. Adequacy - just because something else is significantly better does not make something bad. Being "good enough" has made lots of properties very, very popular.

100%

 

[jinat]

Off the top of my head?

1. Marketing. WotC has spent millions (and lots of millions) in marketing D&D. Something no startup game could possibly match. Doesn't matter how good your game is if no one has heard of it.
2. Tradition - this is enormous. Gamers are INCREDIBLY attached to the game they play.
3. Adequacy - just because something else is significantly better does not make something bad. Being "good enough" has made lots of properties very, very popular.

100%

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Let’s be honest here.

Let's each only speak for ourselves.

 

[Staffan]

But can you point to a free example of what your talking about?

I'm not Umbran, but I'll give it a shot. One of the more intricate sets of rules for social influence is in Exalted 3e, where social influence centers around Intimacies (thing a person cares about or believes). Every social roll either affects an Intimacy (strengthening or weakening it, or creating/destroying it altogether) or uses an Intimacy to persuade someone. In other words, you can't just use social influence to tell someone "Do X", you need to say "Do X because Y." Intimacies come in different strengths, and the stronger the intimacy the bigger the bonus or penalty to the social influence roll is. So if the person you're trying to persuade to support your rebellion has a minor intimacy of "Hate (our overlords)" and a major intimacy of "Don't rock the boat", you will get a small bonus for one and a moderate penalty for the other. Opposing intimacies generally have a larger impact than aligned ones – so if the target has one major intimacy opposing your will and one major intimacy aligning with it, you will take a net small penalty.

If you're trying to give someone a new intimacy, the best you can normally do is a Minor one. In order to give someone a Major intimacy (or increase a Minor to Major), or reduce an intimacy from Major to Minor, that person needs to have a second Minor intimacy that supports the change. A similar limitation applies if you're trying to change an intimacy from Major to Defining or vice versa. In addition, if you're trying to strengthen an intimacy you need to use a stronger argument than whatever caused the intimacy to form in the first place.

Once someone has an intimacy, you can use it to Persuade them. The limits of persuasion depends on the strength of an intimacy: a Minor intimacy can get someone to do inconvenient things, a Major intimacy can get them to do serious and somewhat risky things, and a Defining intimacy can get them to do life-changing and really dangerous things.

You can also use social influence to Bargain (get someone to do something without a supporting intimacy by instead offering a bribe, prize, or something similar), Threaten (similar to Bargain, except you get someone to do something by promising to NOT do something bad in return), or Inspire (instill a strong emotion in the target, but the target determines how they act upon those emotions).

There are of course lots of complications to the rules in question. In all, the social rules take up about 10 pages, and that's just for mundane influence. This being Exalted, there are of course many, many ways to improve your social-fu with magic.

---------

Exalted's social rules are among the more complex I've seen. More common are some variant on rules I first encountered in the original TORG: NPCs have an attitude toward PCs, in the case of TORG divided into five steps: Loyal, Friendly, Neutral, Unfriendly, and Enemy. You can use the skill Charm to try to improve this attitude. There's also another skill, Persuade, which you use to get the target to do something for you. This is more difficult the more unfriendly the target is, and depending on the attitude there are limits to how far you can get the target to go. For example, with someone whose attitude is Neutral or worse, the best you can do is a Negotiated Success, meaning they'll do what you want but want something in exchange.

 

[Parmandur]

It's one of those things that varies between players - and not in a randomised fashion. Players learn off each other, so for one group backgrounds might be a big thing, for another they are pretty much ignored.

Which is itself a feature.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Are we talking about social mechanics here or a new game about church administration? This is diverting Hussar's initial question down a rabbit hole. How does one start to figure out how to determine if preaching gets people coming to the temple? Umbran provided a perfectly reasonable suggestion using ideas already within D&D's structure that seems to meet Hussar's criteria - a social mechanic that can be used to provide an answer. He's already open to the idea that various games with social mechanics may handle this with varying degrees of complexity - that D&D is capable of doing this with little complexity and specificity doesn't seem like a problem. It's not a religious organization simulator or economic simulator - it's a framework for playing out pseudo-medieval fantasy stories. Generating x amount of donations over the week for that intervention seems a pretty reasonable way of rating a level of success - it's up to the DM (or player) to interpret that into something more specific (a wealthy benefactor or a lot of peasants) based on how they want the game to be affected.

Are you suggesting that there is a significant RPG market seeking social mechanics that has more specific answers to these questions - such as exactly how many congregants you'd attract with a week's worth of preaching and how much they'd contribute to the budget of the church? Or a game that meets those needs? If not, then I'm gonna say that diverting into a lot of specific "whatabout" tangents is playing shenanigans with the topic.

I don't know. If we're using downtime rules to find out how much money you make proselyting the masses, then it appears to be a game of church management -- or self enrichment. I pointed out this was a tad crass, you fired back it isn't, so I thought you must have some insight into how 5e does financial management of congregations. I very much know 5e isn't an economy simulator; I wasn't confused on this issue, and I was asking how an answer that provides a monetary result actually works out.

If it's a social matter, pointing out how to repurpose a downtime activity to find out how much money you make seems to have missed the mark. It doesn't answer the question at all, because it gives an answer in gold pieces, not in people attracted to the church. I asked how you can tell who was attracted with this - you seem to have missed this. But regardless, the goal post shift from (paraphrase) "how do we determine how many people I convert" into "how much money do I make" is not getting to the point being made. 5e just doesn't do this well, and so anything done is arbitrary (which I've already said). The idea you've had that how much money you make using downtime rules is a proxy for how many you converted is left pretty open -- how many people does 10 gold coins represent? How many does 1 represent?

As for what 5e is for, I covered this ground already in the first post of mine you quoted (you snipped it out). Telling me the same thing now as if you're giving me new stuff seems pretty odd.

As for are there games where growing a congregation could be an important question? Yup. Are they specific about that one question? No, that's a silly thing to say.

 

[Oofta]

I'm not Umbran, but I'll give it a shot. One of the more intricate sets of rules for social influence is in Exalted 3e, where social influence centers around Intimacies (thing a person cares about or believes). Every social roll either affects an Intimacy (strengthening or weakening it, or creating/destroying it altogether) or uses an Intimacy to persuade someone. In other words, you can't just use social influence to tell someone "Do X", you need to say "Do X because Y." Intimacies come in different strengths, and the stronger the intimacy the bigger the bonus or penalty to the social influence roll is. So if the person you're trying to persuade to support your rebellion has a minor intimacy of "Hate (our overlords)" and a major intimacy of "Don't rock the boat", you will get a small bonus for one and a moderate penalty for the other. Opposing intimacies generally have a larger impact than aligned ones – so if the target has one major intimacy opposing your will and one major intimacy aligning with it, you will take a net small penalty.

If you're trying to give someone a new intimacy, the best you can normally do is a Minor one. In order to give someone a Major intimacy (or increase a Minor to Major), or reduce an intimacy from Major to Minor, that person needs to have a second Minor intimacy that supports the change. A similar limitation applies if you're trying to change an intimacy from Major to Defining or vice versa. In addition, if you're trying to strengthen an intimacy you need to use a stronger argument than whatever caused the intimacy to form in the first place.

Once someone has an intimacy, you can use it to Persuade them. The limits of persuasion depends on the strength of an intimacy: a Minor intimacy can get someone to do inconvenient things, a Major intimacy can get them to do serious and somewhat risky things, and a Defining intimacy can get them to do life-changing and really dangerous things.

You can also use social influence to Bargain (get someone to do something without a supporting intimacy by instead offering a bribe, prize, or something similar), Threaten (similar to Bargain, except you get someone to do something by promising to NOT do something bad in return), or Inspire (instill a strong emotion in the target, but the target determines how they act upon those emotions).

There are of course lots of complications to the rules in question. In all, the social rules take up about 10 pages, and that's just for mundane influence. This being Exalted, there are of course many, many ways to improve your social-fu with magic.

---------

Exalted's social rules are among the more complex I've seen. More common are some variant on rules I first encountered in the original TORG: NPCs have an attitude toward PCs, in the case of TORG divided into five steps: Loyal, Friendly, Neutral, Unfriendly, and Enemy. You can use the skill Charm to try to improve this attitude. There's also another skill, Persuade, which you use to get the target to do something for you. This is more difficult the more unfriendly the target is, and depending on the attitude there are limits to how far you can get the target to go. For example, with someone whose attitude is Neutral or worse, the best you can do is a Negotiated Success, meaning they'll do what you want but want something in exchange.

Is the system and score transparent? Do the characters know where they stand and how to gain (or I guess lose) influence?