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

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well this all started because Cubicle 7 decided to make a 5e version of Dr. Who. So they took a property that is not primarily about fighting and decided to use a game whose mechanics are primarily about fighting.

No one has successfully shown this claim to be true.

The 90% thing came as a criticism of that decision, and then Ray Winninger framed his response as if he took the claim literally.

seems to me he replied in the spirit of the complaint. He didn’t nitpick the percentage or start counting rules in categories, he laughed at the general notion that D&D is mostly about combat.

You mean like you completely failed to answer my question? I mean, I asked, specifically, how many people I would attract to my congregation.

It’s a weird question to expect an answer to. You also might want to try and keep straight who you’re talking to, as I’ve not made any attempt you answer what I consider a merit-less attempt at a gotcha question.

The only answer I was given was how much money I would make.

False. You were given an answer that the game provides framework for non-adventuring activities one intends to benefit from or use to affect the world. You decided to fixate on the specific example used as a proposed model, and wildly misrepresent the answer someone gave you.

Which makes me conclude that, since you are now insisting on this answer, that the rules cannot actually answer my question.

I know you’ve concluded that. You did so before asking the question.

But you’ve also not bothered to establish the relevance of the question. Why does the answer to “how many specific individuals can I bring into a church congregation” matter to a discussion about how much of a game is about combat. Surely you’d need to address questions that a player is actually likely to want an answer to?

And why are you ignoring the entire downtime rule set, as if it doesn’t provide a couple dozen examples of non-adventuring activities that can matter to a degree determined by the priorities of a given campaign? Especially with Xanathar’s, wherein new NPC relationships, reputation quirks, and other complications, can be introduced as a result of those activities.

Why insist that people answer a hyper specific question about an activity that few characters are even going to engage in, and act like it needs to have specific rules for it in order for the game to not be “mostly combat”?

 

[FrogReaver]

I kind of feel like we are a bunch of scientists that took various measurements about a river.

One of us measured it's length.
Another measured it's average width.
Another measured it's average flow rate.
Another measured it's water quality.
Etc.

We all meet back up and argue about which single measurement best describes the river.

I guess I should have added at the start that we aren't very smart scientist

 

[MichaelSomething]

Does this thread mean we need to bring back the Craft and Profession skills from 3rd Edition?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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!

The original claim is vastly more like claiming that the primary ingredient in cookies is vanilla, or perhaps claiming that cookies in general are mostly about chocolate.

None of us are arguing with you because we don’t get soemthing or aren’t discussing the same thing or are using the wrong analogy. We just disagree with the premise that D&D’s rules are mostly about combat. That’s it.

Interestingly, the lines of discussion seem to largely fall the same as they do in discussions that compare D&D and other traditional games to games like PBTA and FITD games.

Some folks value “teeth” in the form of mechanically determined consequences for any aspect of the game to essentially exist, where others just want a framework from which to determine narrative consequences for anything other than life or death physical challenges. Some folks wish D&D did combat via essentially a skill challenge, but that seems to be fairly rare.

Thing is, these are all only preferences. I don’t love that Monster of The Week does fighting via a Kick Some [Butt] move, rather than getting a little more in the weeds, but I get that doing so helps to make the Mundane just as useful and meaningful as the Chosen One. My own systems sits between the two. I also totally understand why a lot of folks prefer that sort of thing.

But the asymmetry and “messiness” of D&D is part of its strength. Combat doesn’t run on the same system as adventuring skill tasks, and neither run the same as downtime activities. They all use the same very basic resolution system, but mostly deviate from there, with spells, individual skills, and race/class features, all varying in which part of the game they primarily contend with, often being capable of contending with two or all three.

Combine all that with a loosely defined framework for most of the game, and an encouragement to use the system as you see fit, to create your own D&D, and you’ve got the most popular TTRPG in history.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Does this thread mean we need to bring back the Craft and Profession skills from 3rd Edition?

I hope not. I fully agree that D&D isn't really a game where you should be looking to setup a business or a trade or establishing a shipping concern.

 

[billd91]

Does this thread mean we need to bring back the Craft and Profession skills from 3rd Edition?

I doubt it. Background covers it pretty well.

 

[BrokenTwin]

@doctorbadwolf

Oh, the original claim that started the thread (D&D is 90% combat) is clearly hyperbolic nonsense. If I had to rough-estimate it based on my own experiences with the system, I'd peg the mechanical weight somewhere around 50% combat / 30% exploration / 20% social, with the in-game usage of said mechanical weight at a high variance per session and campaign. Heck, I'd even be fine with agreeing that combat isn't the majority of the rules, I just think that its the largest portion out of the "three pillars" from a complexity and incentive/reward viewpoint. As are most tabletop RPGs. D&D's not exactly unique in that aspect, as noted by other people earlier in this thread. And I don't think that D&D is a game that needs robust crafting mechanics or social standing mechanics or what have you, it's obviously doing something right to have and keep the audience it has.

And for the record, I don't think (most) of the people in this thread are arguing because they believe the others are "wrongbad", they're just operating under different conceptual frameworks. I don't think you're wrong in your belief that D&D isn't a system that focuses on combat, I just think you're approaching it from a perspective that I'm not, and vice versa. Frankly, I'm not sure why I keep engaging in this thread, it's just people arguing past each other as to whether the primary colors are red/green/blue or yellow/cyan/magenta.

It's a shame that TTRPGs don't really have widely known and defined conceptual frameworks like literature does for deciphering a text through different lenses. Might actually help with these discussions.

 

[Ovinomancer]

@doctorbadwolf

Oh, the original claim that started the thread (D&D is 90% combat) is clearly hyperbolic nonsense. If I had to rough-estimate it based on my own experiences with the system, I'd peg the mechanical weight somewhere around 50% combat / 30% exploration / 20% social, with the in-game usage of said mechanical weight at a high variance per session and campaign. Heck, I'd even be fine with agreeing that combat isn't the majority of the rules, I just think that its the largest portion out of the "three pillars" from a complexity and incentive/reward viewpoint. As are most tabletop RPGs. D&D's not exactly unique in that aspect, as noted by other people earlier in this thread. And I don't think that D&D is a game that needs robust crafting mechanics or social standing mechanics or what have you, it's obviously doing something right to have and keep the audience it has.

And for the record, I don't think (most) of the people in this thread are arguing because they believe the others are "wrongbad", they're just operating under different conceptual frameworks. I don't think you're wrong in your belief that D&D isn't a system that focuses on combat, I just think you're approaching it from a perspective that I'm not, and vice versa. Frankly, I'm not sure why I keep engaging in this thread, it's just people arguing past each other as to whether the primary colors are red/green/blue or yellow/cyan/magenta.

It's a shame that TTRPGs don't really have widely known and defined conceptual frameworks like literature does for deciphering a text through different lenses. Might actually help with these discussions.

So, I think that it's inarguable that D&D is combat focused as designed. A table could drift the game away from this, intentionally or unintentionally, but in doing so they have to provide the extra structure themselves. This is a large part of the homebrew aesthetic that permeates D&D -- it's the representation of this drift of the game from what it is as presented to what they try to get out of it.

 

[Hussar]

I answered it. Just not in the way folks assumed it would be answered.

"How many slices of pepperoni are on this pizza?"
"Lots!" or, "Just a few," are viable answers.

I submit that expecting quantitative answers, without giving a reason or context for needing them, is a path to over-specifying, which eventually leads to design conflicts, as the left design hand doesn't know what the right design hand is doing.

Q:How many slices of pepperoni are on this pizza?

A:15 dollars worth.

That's not even a qualitative answer. And that's exactly the answer you gave me.

 

[Hussar]

I'm terms of a profession result simulation, money = people in this case, and can easily be converted by a DM on the fly. Straightforward and easy to run, precisely because it does come up.

You might be confusing Editions: 5E has no "rules" for buying magic items, just pure DM fiat. In contrast, there are rules

Funny. My Xanathar's Guide seems to disagree with you.