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

 

[Aldarc]

Well, people do like context for their combat game. Like where and why you're fighting, for example.

Or ways to avoid small fights so you conserve resources (e.g., HP, spells, abilities, etc.) for big fights.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, but, saying that chocolate flavored baked goods are largely about chocolate is a fair statement.

No, it isn’t. It is a patently absurd falsehood that no person would make up unless trying to “win” an argument with extremely strange arguments that don’t hold up to even the smallest possible amount of examination.

D&D is largely about combat is not really much of a stretch, IMO. Everything else in the game is so skeletal compared to other systems.

So, if it's not about combat, what is it about? Romance? Nope. Diplomacy? Not really? I know, economics. Oh, right, 50 years of D&D and not once is an in-game economy given more than the slightest nod.

I'm really rather at a loss to say what D&D is about if it's not about combat. It's an action movie. That's the meat and potatoes of the game, to torture the food metaphor a little more. Sure, there's other stuff. No one eats JUST meat and potatoes. But, just because there might be broccoli or peas or whatnot on the plate, the one thing you can always count on is that meat and potatoes will be there.

Roleplaying. It’s about playing a character.

LOL.

Sure, the game that has the MOST support for out of combat material is the one that is "largely about combat."

Hell, this is perfect for this conversation. 4e was rejected, partly anyway, BECAUSE it focused so much of the mechanics outside of combat. Speaks volumes for how important combat is to D&D gamers. Heck, my cleric question actually gets answered in 4e - you make it a skill challenge and work out, depending on the complexity, how many converts the cleric makes. It wouldn't actually be that hard in 4e. As an added bonus, you could turn it into a nice little mini game for the entire group, if you were so inclined.

This is the wildest, most ridiculous, most directly and objectively false, thing anyone has said in this thread. Most people who didn’t like 4e viewed it as entirely about combat.

If that's the setting you want to play, and you decided to use the 5e D&D system.... would you expect that game to be very satisfactory?

Yes. Seriously go grab your phb, and read the rules that aren’t in the class chapter or spells list (two sections that will very obviously be removed wholesale and replaced with something genre and theme appropriate) Just looking at the ability checks section and the backgrounds and such (and the downtime and tools mechanics in Xanathar’s bc they expanded the game in really interesting ways), it’s very easy to see that it can support pretty much any genre and theme.

 

[Oofta]

Well, people do like context for their combat game. Like where and why you're fighting, for example.

I view a lot of the effort put into the books as a how-to build a fantasy world. This is specifically a D&D fantasy world, so yes many of the obstacles are resolved by combat.

But the real focus of the games to me is not the combat any more than a vacation is about getting to your destination. For some getting there is the focus ( I personally love road trips), for others it's just part of the package and everything in between.

But it's all just personal perspective and opinion, I simply don't agree that one person's perspective is "inarguable".

 

[Maxperson]

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.

I'm out of my depth with this one.

 

[Aldarc]

The game as designed? What does that even mean? Are you talking about OD&D? Because D&D grew out of a wargame because people wanted something other than combat in their game. Are you talking about the written rules? Because that's about 50/50. The way it's discussed? Read the DMG sometime about world building, if the game is all about combat why would you need any of that?

We need concrete rules for combat. We get descriptive text, fluff and guidance for most of the out of combat stuff with a handful of rules. But we still get that out of combat stuff throughout all of he books.

Was it that they wanted something other than combat or, alternatively, that they wanted to play combat from the perspective of a single character? There was a similar development with the history of MOBAs. MOBAs grew out of RTS games (i.e., Warcraft III), which amounted to a shift from controlling an army with hero units to every player only controlling a single hero unit. But it was not because they wanted something other than combat in their game.

 

[payn]

I'm out of my depth with this one.

It's best to just forge ahead on this one.

 

[Maxperson]

It's best to just forge ahead on this one.

That's what I'm currently doing.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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

Tool and instrument proficiencies, and backgrounds, cover this, actually.

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.

There is no misunderstanding, though it’s hilarious that you make such a condescending garbage post and end it by demanding that I be nicer to you.

People have engaged with you question because it has an easy answer, not because it has any possibility of proving anything relevant to the discussion.

And @Umbran literally answered your weird, hyper specific to an edge case, question. The ability check rules, especially as expanded in the downtime section, provide the framework for determining the success of an Interaction challenge.

Your insistence on not acknowledging that, and claiming that D&D not having a premade, prescriptive, specific rule for determining the number of followers you can get in an extremely specific context in a given amount of time proves that D&D is actually just about combat is absolutely the weirdest behavior to be found in this thread.

Plenty of support for that argument has been given. The vast majority of mechanics in D&D are combat based.

Prove it. Others have challenged this claim, and no one has tangibly supported it in response.

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.

But it isn’t. This is only true if you insist on viewing the question through the lense of “complexity = weight/importance”, or a similar lense. The ability checks section is much more the core of the game. Combat is literally designed to be quick and let you get back to the important stuff.

You could easily build a whole 5e based game without the combat section, and with no classes getting any combat abilities (though DW should have room for a Jack Harkness), and some added proficiencies to leverage with the ability check rules.

 

[payn]

That's what I'm currently doing.

Probably for the best. A few folks here seem to be in the Nile about it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Tool and instrument proficiencies, and backgrounds, cover this, actually.

There is no misunderstanding, though it’s hilarious that you make such a condescending garbage post and end it by demanding that I be nicer to you.

People have engaged with you question because it has an easy answer, not because it has any possibility of proving anything relevant to the discussion.

And @Umbran literally answered your weird, hyper specific to an edge case, question. The ability check rules, especially as expanded in the downtime section, provide the framework for determining the success of an Interaction challenge.

Your insistence on not acknowledging that, and claiming that D&D not having a premade, prescriptive, specific rule for determining the number of followers you can get in an extremely specific context in a given amount of time proves that D&D is actually just about combat is absolutely the weirdest behavior to be found in this thread.

Prove it. Others have challenged this claim, and no one has tangibly supported it in response.

But it isn’t. This is only true if you insist on viewing the question through the lense of “complexity = weight/importance”, or a similar lense. The ability checks section is much more the core of the game. Combat is literally designed to be quick and let you get back to the important stuff.

You could easily build a whole 5e based game without the combat section, and with no classes getting any combat abilities (though DW should have room for a Jack Harkness), and some added proficiencies to leverage with the ability check rules.

Combat is designed to be quick? In 5e? Not my experience. Combat is designed to have a bunch of cool stuff for you to do. Not for speed.