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

 

[Hussar]

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.

Which is fantastic.

Now, what part of D&D were you referencing there? What downtime rules were you looking at? And, how did he do a downtime activity without spending at least a week? That must have been one helluva sermon.

 

[Hussar]

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?

Funnily enough, no one else seems to have any problem following the conversation @doctorbadwolf. Everyone else understands perfectly clearly what I'm talking about. So, instead of again insisting on bad faith, perhaps you could ask questions to clear up your misunderstandings? If it's not clear why I brought up this example, and everyone else seems to have no problems understanding it, perhaps the failure to understand isn't on my side of the fence here.

So, a second time, and more politely than the first, I ask that you either dial back the snark and personal attacks please. It's not helping the conversation.

 

[Hussar]

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.

Really?

That's something that I've always thought was missing from the game. Whether it's something as simple as getting a land award for your actions by the king - how much gold per year is a 50 acre parcel of farmland worth? - or being able to be tavern owners or various other business opportunities. Domain management (whether very small scale or large) seems to be a pretty interesting design niche.

I mean, Pathfinder's Kingmaker AP (not the video game, the tabletop module I mean) seemed pretty well received. I haven't actually looked at it, but, it seemed to generate rather a lot of buzz.

 

[Parmandur]

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

You know what,y bad, I was just thinking of the DMG, which has downtime profession rules but no crafting or item buying rules. Forgot about that page of content in XGtE.

 

[Hussar]

I mentioned Ghosts of Saltmarsh upthread. And it seems apropos here. In GoS, you have seven adventures. Only one of the adventures, as written, is potentially resolvable without combat. Danger at Dunwater can actually be completely resolved (although it's unlikely) without combat. Granted, if the party does do this, the module will take about 30 minutes to complete and is basically a 20 page description of a lizard folk lair, but, truthfully, it is possible to do it.

But, then we have six other modules where combat is going to feature very, very heavily. So, even here, we're 6/7 - that's pretty close to that 90% number. And GoS is hardly alone in this. Other than Strixhaven (which I haven't read) and some of Candlekeep Mysteries (which I am very familiar with), the WotC modules are going to feature a LOT of combat. And even Candlekeep is still easily 50/50 in combat resolutions. It's certainly assumed in most of the modules.

Going back to GoS for a second. It's very telling that in a module where you have a dwarven mining operation and a major trader in Saltmarsh from Iuz, the only new rules we get in the module are ship to ship combat. Nothing about navigation. Nothing about running a ship. Nothing about trading. Nope, only in how to handle ship to ship combat. Granted, we NEEDED ship to ship combat rules. I won't say that we didn't. We certainly did. But, it's pretty telling that that's the only thing we got. Several pages detailing Saltmarsh and it's environs and virtually nothing on how to engage with any of it outside of killing stuff.

 

[Hussar]

You know what,y bad, I was just thinking of the DMG, which has downtime profession rules but no crafting or item buying rules. Forgot about that page of content in XGtE.

Totally fair. I forget stuff like this all the time. No worries.

 

[hawkeyefan]

No one has successfully shown this claim to be true.

Plenty of support for that argument has been given. The vast majority of mechanics in D&D are combat based. The application of mechanics during play is mostly about combat. I don't even know why anyone would try to argue otherwise. It's not a bad thing. It simply is.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Really?

That's something that I've always thought was missing from the game. Whether it's something as simple as getting a land award for your actions by the king - how much gold per year is a 50 acre parcel of farmland worth? - or being able to be tavern owners or various other business opportunities. Domain management (whether very small scale or large) seems to be a pretty interesting design niche.

I mean, Pathfinder's Kingmaker AP (not the video game, the tabletop module I mean) seemed pretty well received. I haven't actually looked at it, but, it seemed to generate rather a lot of buzz.

I've no problem with there being a 3rd party or even 1st party optional supplement, but space in the core or even primary splats? Not a word, please. Starting with there's nothing at all about D&D that even remotely looks like a functional economy, rules for how to operate an economic venture already start totally incoherent. And, no, I don't really want D&D to adopt a functional economy, because I don't want to play Taxes and Tallies.

 

[Hussar]

Ok, the question was asked, why would a player of a cleric want to know how many people his sermons have brought into his flock?

If I may, I'll give two answers to this - one in game and one out of game.

The out of game reason, for me, would be that as a player, I'm trying to embed my character into the setting by engaging directly in the setting. I'm doing something that, to me, seems very in keeping with a character - a cleric trying to attract a flock seems pretty straight forward to me. I'm doing this because I want to ground my character in the setting, embedding it into the setting as deeply as I can, and also to give the DM an opportunity to showcase the setting to me and to the group in a fairly natural way. I'm handing the DM a golden opportunity here to hook adventures, introduce NPC's and develop the setting. I'm playing the way I hope that my players would play. As a DM, I LOVE it when players engage in the game this way and I will bend over backwards to accommodate any player that does this.

The in game reason is that as a cleric, spreading the word is a major part of the character and becoming part of the community allows my character to do that. Additionally, it might be helpful down the road - if I need something built, for example, do I have a carpenter in my flock. Can I call on the flock to do stuff? Can I turn it into a resource? Additionally, a greater flock leads to a stronger organization and seeing the spread of a faith is generally speaking often a goal of clergy. Not always, sure. And I'm not saying that every cleric has to do this. But, it's not totally unreasonable either.

So, hopefully that clears up why I would ask my DM how many people come to my sermons. Which is why, "15 gp" doesn't really work as an answer to any of the reasons I'm asking this question. It doesn't do anything for me as a player and in no way furthers the goals of my character. It's a pretty unsatisfactory answer.

And, in a system that isn't so focused on combat, it's a question that I can ACTUALLY get an answer to.

 

[Hussar]

I've no problem with there being a 3rd party or even 1st party optional supplement, but space in the core or even primary splats? Not a word, please. Starting with there's nothing at all about D&D that even remotely looks like a functional economy, rules for how to operate an economic venture already start totally incoherent. And, no, I don't really want D&D to adopt a functional economy, because I don't want to play Taxes and Tallies.

I'm going to disagree here. I think there is more than enough interest in something like this to justify at least a module or a supplement on it. Maybe a chapter in the DMG. I dunno. Throw me a frikkin bone here.

AIR, wasn't Matt Collville's Strongholds & Followers one of the top money making Kickstarters of all time? Something like 2 million dollars for a book? I'd say that there was some serious interest in this sort of thing.