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

 

[Older Beholder]

This is odd. The play you do that you don't ever even need to read or look at a D&D book because it's all playing pretend is totally D&D, but the bits where you absolutely are engaging with the rules of the game is not D&D.

Why is it that the things that can be done without D&D -- the things we do all on our own with no help -- are credited to D&D so often?

It's not that odd to me, the making of a character and playing that character are what make a roleplaying game, (in this case D&D) for me.

Using the combat rules without a story or character wouldn't be to me. D&D is a roleplay game, not a battle-system.

 

[Ovinomancer]

In regards to the example of a cleric attracting a flock, I used the downtime rules to do this in a game recently.

There is a large multi-faith church in the city dedicated to the 'Forgotten Gods' (Gods from Forgotten Realms) and the head priest asked the player to give a sermon. I did something similar with each player as part of leveling up.

I had my player make 3 skill checks:
Religion, Insight, and Persuasion

This was at level 2, so he only needed to pass 2 out of 3 in order to earn his place. He succeeded and I had a few people approach him after the speech, expressing an interest. Going forward, he will gain/lose a follower for each point over/under the set DC for each skill check.

He messaged me after the game to tell me how much he liked that aspect of the session.

This is reasonable, but it's exactly the kind of arbitrary thing that I was talking about is the only answer to the question. You've created a sort of short skill challenge which isn't present in any of the 5e examples or recommendations, and you've created a tiered result for how many people the sermons attract which also isn't at all present in any of the 5e examples or recommendations of play. You had to create some mechanics to answer the question -- 5e didn't help do this.

This is the intended design approach of 5e, and it works so long as you don't go outside the lines very often or you have a group that really loves coming up with lots of detailed houserules. It's a great "per table" approach, but it works because most tables do not go outside the lines. You can seem some of that in the numerous points made by people here that gathering a flock isn't what D&D is about.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What's odd is people insisting that combat is the only aspect of D&D that matters.

No one has done this.

D&D is, for lack of a better term, it's own genre. Yes some other games copy it, but they are copies. It has it's own mythology, feel and style. Specific implementation significantly but most games share more in imagery, expectations, general cultural expectations than not.

Yup. I 100% agree with this. But then it gets put out there that it's also great for any other genre you might want to run. Or that it can handle any kind of play you might want it to. But, it doesn't -- it does D&D well. And that's a great thing, in my opinion, I enjoy D&D. I also enjoy other things, so I like to play games that do that as well. If you're happy within the D&D genre, which is fundamentally epitomized by the statement "kill things and take their stuff," great, no need to go elsewhere. If you want something else, you either have to seriously hack D&D and deal with that or you should look to a different game.

So you don't get to tell people that they aren't playing D&D when they aren't referencing rules. Could I have similar experiences with a different game? Sure. But those wouldn't be D&D.

Oh, my, I'm not the one that told anyone they weren't playing D&D. That was @LizardWizard. I asked why he would say just playing pretend is totally D&D while actually using the rules is not. I then wondered why we attribute those things we do that we don't need D&D to do to D&D as if that's what enables those things. You can absolutely play pretend AND play D&D. But the part about playing pretend isn't given to you by D&D -- you have that within yourself already. D&D didn't give it to you.

 

[Malmuria]

When I see "feels like dnd" I think of the themes and aesthetics that have made it its own genre. Like how every OSR game, no matter how light, will definitely have an equipment/weapons page. The aesthetic of the game.
Pretty much all the things that make it into 80s and 90s CRPGs.

 

[Cruentus]

Bah, humbug! Obviously we need to have rules for establishing a trade network along with every other possible interaction outside of combat that there is. Not sure how that could be accomplished.

There are some 3PP books that deal with some of this stuff, but because it's nearly infinite in scope, I don't see how it could be added without significant bloat. That, and I prefer free-form with light rules for most of the game. I just need concrete rules for combat because I wouldn't know where to start.

I think I'd prefer rules about how to set up an economy or a congregation before rules that boil down to: roll die, roll higher than an arbitrarily decided number, roll different die to do damage, subtract from another arbitrarily derived number. I don't need 50% of any book to tell me how to do that. I've played enough games that coming up with "combat" is super simple. I do it all the time with my son, and he does it too - for legos, miniatures, when he DMs. He doesn't follow DnD's rules for combat, he makes them up, and we are absolutely still playing DnD. We're playing it our way.

So it all really boils down to what any one person wants or expects from the rules they're playing. There really is no pleasing everyone all the time. Obviously.

And again, if I want to play DnD, I can go to 3PP resources to add things into the game that I consider front and center to DnD, namely social and exploration stuff, because DnD doesn't cover it beyond: make it up? Okeydokey.

By the same token, DnD must not do combat, or classes, or backgrounds, or monsters very well either, since there's a lot of 3PP material out there on that too...

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is odd. The play you do that you don't ever even need to read or look at a D&D book because it's all playing pretend is totally D&D, but the bits where you absolutely are engaging with the rules of the game is not D&D.

Why is it that the things that can be done without D&D -- the things we do all on our own with no help -- are credited to D&D so often?

I suspect it's because D&D is so often conflate with TTRPGs in general. No matter what you're playing, you're playing D&D.

 

[Oofta]

I think I'd prefer rules about how to set up an economy or a congregation before rules that boil down to: roll die, roll higher than an arbitrarily decided number, roll different die to do damage, subtract from another arbitrarily derived number. I don't need 50% of any book to tell me how to do that. I've played enough games that coming up with "combat" is super simple. I do it all the time with my son, and he does it too - for legos, miniatures, when he DMs. He doesn't follow DnD's rules for combat, he makes them up, and we are absolutely still playing DnD. We're playing it our way.

So it all really boils down to what any one person wants or expects from the rules they're playing. There really is no pleasing everyone all the time. Obviously.

And again, if I want to play DnD, I can go to 3PP resources to add things into the game that I consider front and center to DnD, namely social and exploration stuff, because DnD doesn't cover it beyond: make it up? Okeydokey.

By the same token, DnD must not do combat, or classes, or backgrounds, or monsters very well either, since there's a lot of 3PP material out there on that too...

No game can be everything to everybody. Some games have very constrained focus, they define who you are, what the factions are, other things relevant to running the game. D&D is more of a foundation, a building block for a wide variety of campaigns.

Your hyperbole notwithstanding D&D puts the focus on generic lore that can be adopted to many different campaigns along with combat rules with support for out of combat stuff. Is that support for out of combat relatively minimal? Sure. Which is the way I like it. If you want detailed campaign rules for every aspect of the game world you're going to have to pick a system with a much more constrained focus.

 

[Older Beholder]

Oh, my, I'm not the one that told anyone they weren't playing D&D. That was @LizardWizard.

If this is what you took from my post, then I apologize. If people want to choose monsters from MM and fight then against each other and call it D&D, that's fine.

Personally, if someone said we were going to play D&D, and I turned up and instead of making a character they asked me to pick a monster from the MM to fight against the other players who were asked to do the same, I would feel that it didn't meet my expectations of playing D&D.

If however I turned up and made we made characters and then hung out in a tavern roleplaying our characters introductions and never left the bar or got into a fight. I'd feel like I had played D&D and that my expectations were met.

 

[Ovinomancer]

If this is what you took from my post, then I apologize. If people want to choose monsters from MM and fight then against each other and call it D&D, that's fine.

Personally, if someone said we were going to play D&D, and I turned up and instead of making a character they asked me to pick a monster from the MM to fight against the other players who were asked to do the same, I would feel that it didn't meet my expectations of playing D&D.

If however I turned up and made we made characters and then hung out in a tavern roleplaying our characters introductions and never left the bar or got into a fight. I'd feel like I had played D&D and that my expectations were met.

Okay. However, my following point still stands -- to do the thing you feel most like you're playing D&D, you don't even need D&D to do. That's just you playing pretend with friends -- an entertaining thing to do -- but you don't need anything from D&D to do this at all.

 

[BrokenTwin]

No game can be everything to everybody. Some games have very constrained focus, they define who you are, what the factions are, other things relevant to running the game. D&D is more of a foundation, a building block for a wide variety of campaigns.

Your hyperbole notwithstanding D&D puts the focus on generic lore that can be adopted to many different campaigns along with combat rules with support for out of combat stuff. Is that support for out of combat relatively minimal? Sure. Which is the way I like it. If you want detailed campaign rules for every aspect of the game world you're going to have to pick a system with a much more constrained focus.

The bolded line is literally all I've been saying, and I believe what the others have been saying as well. That the combat mechanics are relatively more robust than other areas of the rules. Which means, to us, that the mechanical weight of the D&D system is primarily weighted towards handling combat interactions.

There's nothing wrong with that. Saying something tasting like chocolate doesn't mean that we're disparaging the people who like chocolate. Hell, I'm quite fond of chocolate. But sometimes I prefer vanilla, and being able to discuss food is a lot easier when we can agree that the primary part of a chocolate chip cookie is the chocolate chips, even if they don't make up the physical majority of the cookie. Heck, that chocolate chip cookie probably has vanilla in it. When I want a strong vanilla flavour, I'm not going to reach for a chocolate chip cookie. But if you prefer to add more vanilla to the chocolate chip cookie, that's fine too!