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]

Was it that they wanted something other than combat or, alternatively, that they wanted to play combat from the perspective of a single character?

You know that no edition of D&D has been just rules for combat, right?

Like there are no non-combat elements in LoL. The comparison is bunk.

It’s absurd to suggest that D&D’s development was just about “controlling a single hero unit”.

 

[tetrasodium]

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

don't dredge too deep

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.

The designers are explicitly on record on this one, though it may be hard to find interviews and such from 2014 about their design decisions.

 

[Aldarc]

You know that no edition of D&D has been just rules for combat, right?

You know that I haven't argued this at all, right?

It’s absurd to suggest that D&D’s development was just about “controlling a single hero unit”.

It's absurd that you think that this is my thesis statement, yet here we are.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

@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.

Great points.

Bringing it back to the thread topic’s origin, if you look at where most of the combat rules are, it’s in stuff that a genre-changing 5e based game is never going to keep anyway. No way a weird sci-fi 5e-powered game is going to have rogues and paladins and zone of truth.

What people keep saying is the “actual point” of the hyperbolic nonsense claim in question, isn’t a reasonable worry.

 

[tetrasodium]

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.

I'm in complete agreement. For all the lip service & cheering abour o5e being designed to make combat quick I find that it turns into a slog with all the depth & speed of a drawn out game of rockemsockemrobots all too often without the tactical grid & powerful control/buff/debuff type stuff that used to allow it to ascend from slog to competence porn in the past. Functionally the "bunch of stuff you can do" is rarely more than the illusion of choice because it's either basically multiple options with dramatically similar end results when it comes down to any meaningful measurement or there is one option that is leagues ahead of all the nonchoice options.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

You know that I haven't argued this at all, right?

BS. It’s a direct response to your suggestion that D&D was made in order to play single combatants rather than armies.

It's absurd that you think that this is my thesis statement, yet here we are.

You literally, explicitly, compared early D&D to MOBAs, in the motivation for its development.

 

[BrokenTwin]

I will say, in regards to what actually started this thread (Cubicle 7 porting their Doctor Who RPG to a 5E framework), I do trust their ability to deliver a system that focusing on what makes Doctor Who feel like Doctor Who. While I was initially highly skeptical of their conversion of TOR to AiME, I think they did a fantastic job of converting it and preserving the flavour of the setting. I still prefer the original, and I'm sad they lost the license, but I do think they're fully capable of creating a good Doctor Who game on the 5E chassis. I don't think it will be as good as their original system, but they clearly believe that the cost/benefit analysis of producing a 5E derivative of their system lands in their favour, and they're probably right.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I guess it falls under 'Rulings not rules'?
It was based on the general principle of the downtime rules requiring 3 skill checks. It still feels pretty true to that, rather than it's own mini game.

As I mentioned, so far it was only used to gain entry into the church, and only a few people expressed an interest after the sermon, no one was fully converted or anything. I'll see how it pans out in future sessions, you're right, going forward it will require a week's worth of time to attract followers.

I didn't bring this up as support for an argument, I just thought people might find it interesting. I'm happy for feedback on it as an idea.

It’s a really good (and fairly obvious, IMO) application of existing principles. You could have made it a single roll, as is often the go-to, but the downtimes mechanics provide a framework for making more complex ability check resolution with more nuanced results.

To determine the results of the PCs efforts over time, you could either repeat the process several times, or just zoom out and use the downtime rules more directly, simply creating a new downtime activity, which is a normal part of 5e D&D.

 

[payn]

I will say, in regards to what actually started this thread (Cubicle 7 porting their Doctor Who RPG to a 5E framework), I do trust their ability to deliver a system that focusing on what makes Doctor Who feel like Doctor Who. While I was initially highly skeptical of their conversion of TOR to AiME, I think they did a fantastic job of converting it and preserving the flavour of the setting. I still prefer the original, and I'm sad they lost the license, but I do think they're fully capable of creating a good Doctor Who game on the 5E chassis. I don't think it will be as good as their original system, but they clearly believe that the cost/benefit analysis of producing a 5E derivative of their system lands in their favour, and they're probably right.

Right, you cant judge a game by its system cover...or something like that. At first glance, its a terrible fit. Though, it could be entirely rearranged and work out fine. Cant knock it until you rock it is what I say.