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

 

[CleverNickName]

Is D&D mostly a combat simulation?
Is D&D mostly a cooperative storytelling game?
Is D&D a perfectly balanced mix of the two?

My answer to each question is "Do you want it to be?"

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So D&D 5E as written seems to have a greater emphasis on combat than D&D 5E as played.

That’s been posited before, and I disagree just as strongly now as I did then. 5e as written codifies combat, sure, and loot tables and has an assumed level of combat to balance classes in combat. It has much just as much non-combat, and the 6 encounters aren’t actually assumed to all be combat.

Everyone has stuff to do in exploration, and most characters have things to do in interaction (seriously fighters and barbarians…), and the classes with a lot of resources have ways to spend them in social and/or interaction challenges, which is part of the intended balance of the game.

D&D 5e is designed to be played using all 3 pillars.

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I've seen it mentioned a few times now, so I have to ask: why do some people feel that combat REQUIRES more complexity than other areas? I'm curious if someone in favour of the concept could provide me with a more detailed explanation of their reasoning.
For the record, I do believe that the additional complexity for combat serves the purposes of the fantasy hero concept that D&D provides, but the people I've seen advocating this idea seem to believe that combat is just inherently more complex than other areas of life that can be emulated in TTRPGs, and I don't understand that logic.

Social challenges can easily be satisfying in very free form design. Very little mechanics required, and narrative consequence is the only needed consequence. IMO, combat with purely narrative consequence would not be worth including in the game, and combat that involves one or two skill checks in a fairly free form narrative structure would be, at absolute best, quite unsatisfying.

I also find 5e’s exploration rules lacking, btw, because it lacks sufficient complexity in the places where I want complexity.

Even in my own game, which is 90% skills, and where all conflict scenes resolve in the same framework, combat has a little more definition in terms of conditions, skills, etc, than other sorts of challenges.

The point where specificity starts to obstruct is much easier to reach in social rules than in physical contest rules, IMO/E.

 

[Staffan]

I've seen it mentioned a few times now, so I have to ask: why do some people feel that combat REQUIRES more complexity than other areas? I'm curious if someone in favour of the concept could provide me with a more detailed explanation of their reasoning.

Combat is a matter of life and death. To many that requires, if not complexity per se, at least a certain... rigidity. If your PC should die, it should be because the rules say so, not because the DM felt that way. And this desire for clearly defined rules easily becomes a desire for more detailed and complex rules.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It would, in my estimation, be an unsatisfactory game. Removing all the bits related to combat, what remains is a bare bones skill system,

“Bare bones” is, IMO, a false judgement. The skill system would be bare bones if it was designed to do a job and then barely had what it needed to do the bare minimum of that job. Ie, if it was designed poorly, not to the desired effect.

The 5e skill system does exactly what it’s meant to do, and does it very well. You may not prefer a conversational rules engine, but that has nothing to do with how well designed, or impactful on play, that engine is.

a list of backgrounds that offer access to those skills along with a specific social/exploration ability, and non-combat spells and feats.

You think that's satisfying? You don't think that Cubicle 7 is going to attempt to replace all the stuff they have to take out with new rules? New classes, different backgrounds, new feats....and so on? I expect they will and that's because the 5e system without combat is barely anything.

Where did I suggest any such thing? I explicitly stated that they would replace what is removed with genre and theme appropriate player options. Like pretty much every 5e based game does. It isn’t a unique challenge by any stretch of the imagination.

The common claim for the strength of D&D's social game is that "the rules get out of the way and allow improvisational roleplay". This claim is weak because

It isn’t weak at all. That you are so dismissive of it is part of why these discussions go in circles.

Right. The first thing they need to do is jettison most of the mechanics.

To the same extent that every 5e powered game does so. Just as much would be removed to do a Star Wars 5e-based game. About all that would be added back in would be extra attack and things like expertise, but it would still look very different from the 5e PHB.

Im pretty sure there are classless 5e based games out there. The classes are player options. They aren’t the system.

Doctor Who will have player options custom built to play a game of Doctor Who, obviously. All that is relevant to how well the port will work, is the system itself, not the specific player options in the core 5e game.

As and aside, yes, I’d play and enjoy a well presented game that was 5e’s backgrounds, ability check rules, downtime rules, and some of the expanded stuff in the setting books and adventures that have come out, with no classes, spells, or feats.

Id want some kind of player options to expand beyond backgrounds and some proficiencies, and you’d need some way of determining how one chooses proficiencies beyond just the few you get in a background, even if it’s just “you pick 3 skills, and 4 tools or languages, in addition to those granted by your background”, but it would be a perfectly fun game where you aren’t playing epic heroes.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Combat is a matter of life and death. To many that requires, if not complexity per se, at least a certain... rigidity. If your PC should die, it should be because the rules say so, not because the DM felt that way. And this desire for clearly defined rules easily becomes a desire for more detailed and complex rules.

I experienced this as a little kid, even. Why trust my idiot brother’s claims as to the angle of my bright orange pistol? We need some sort of impartial way to determine if we hit!

Nothing remotely like that ever came up with regard to social interactions in our make believe. Only physical contests.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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.

Counterpoint: depending on what you want to do with the flock, the answer will vary. Just rp? Then the dm can ust make something up. Use aa a resource? Than whatever measure of resources makes the most sense - 15 gp worth means you can get 15 g worth of stuff form the people you swayed. Or maybe it means you got enough people to donate 15 gp to the church, which you can spend on church stuff. This can be quite helpful if everyone else's downtime activity was to earn money - now you can just use the same downtime setup as everyone else.

It's not that you couldn't have a contextless answer - but a contextless answer can be dang near anything. "You attract one (1) crowd of people." Boom, answered.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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.

Well, compared to pre-essentials 4e and lategame 3e it is.

Which is like saying a centipede has fewer legs than a millipede - technically true, but it's still a lot.

 

[Aldarc]

You seem to be being a bit obtuse, here.

You made that comparison as a challenge to the notion that part of D&D’s development was a desire for more than just combat. This implies (and it’s barely less than explicit) that the creation of D&D had nothing to do with roleplaying, or any other element of D&D than “combat involving several individual characters”.

I think that the desire for D&D's development was not necessarily about wanting to do something other than combat. I think that the desire was as simple as wanting to go from playing an army to playing from the perspective of a character (from that army) in that world. That may involve combat, and it also may not, but it also clearly involved the Chainmail rules for combat for both Arneson and Gygax. I also believe that this aforementioned desire was, in part, what similarly inspired the development of DotA as a WC3 mod: i.e., a transition from macroing an army to microing a single unit. This is not to say that MOBAs involve roleplaying or are about anything other than combat. I am aware that it is (typically) a 5v5 competitive arena mode. This is also not to say that D&D is only about combat. It's only to say that the transition from wargames to D&D was likely motivated from a desire to play as a single unit and shift away from large scale warfare games.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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I've seen it mentioned a few times now, so I have to ask: why do some people feel that combat REQUIRES more complexity than other areas? I'm curious if someone in favour of the concept could provide me with a more detailed explanation of their reasoning.
For the record, I do believe that the additional complexity for combat serves the purposes of the fantasy hero concept that D&D provides, but the people I've seen advocating this idea seem to believe that combat is just inherently more complex than other areas of life that can be emulated in TTRPGs, and I don't understand that logic.

My own opinions: "requires" is a weird word to use, since it's all a game: we don't need any of it.

But as for the drive toward more detailed combat rules: my best guess is combat nearly always carries the risk of character loss. That is, it's usually on the table (whether or not likely) that based on the results of combat, you might be forced by the rules to stop playing that character. When this happens, you really really want it to feel fair. If character loss feels unfair, it can undo all the fun you had with that character. Yes, even the fun you already had goes away, as the memory is soured by the unfairness of it all.

Ergo, detailed, specific-ish rules to mitigate the sense of unfairness. Note that fair is not the same as balanced or controlled - but those contribute.

This doesn't explain why DnD combat rules are the way they are, but it does explain why few games resolve combat to the death with a single die roll.

For most non-combat scenes, this doesn't matter as much. It extremely rare that you can talk your character out of the game without a combat happening first - no matter how badly you insult the king, you usually get a chance to escape. So it's fine that the rules for talking are loose - it's not as important that they be fair.

In a game very unlike DnD, these assumptions could be wrong, though I can't think of one offhand that isn't notably weird in some way like Microscope.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, compared to pre-essentials 4e and lategame 3e it is.

Which is like saying a centipede has fewer legs than a millipede - technically true, but it's still a lot.

True. Howver, you don't put as much work into combat rules as they have in 5e because you want to get through the fight quickly and get to the "more important stuff". You just don't. Combat is the important stuff, with the highest stakes, and thus uses the most complex rules. Everything about how the game is designed says this, even if the developers deny it.