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

 

[theCourier]

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.

You can chalk combat up to a single roll based on some sort of nebulous, all-encompassing "attack" stat or skill. Then compare rolls to see who got the higher number (no modifiers needed, even) and then adjudicate the results based on the intentions of the winning combatant.

Combat is just another action in a roleplaying game. Like crafting an item, or trying to convince someone to drop the ideology they've followed their whole life, or skinning an animal you've hunted. Depending on what players are looking for, and what a system is trying to do, there's no inherent need for any of these actions to be more complicated than a single roll. Expanding upon those things shows you what a system is interested in doing, or encourages players to do/not to do.

 

[BrokenTwin]

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.

That makes sense, though it feels like a result of safeguards being baked in to mitigate adversarial GMing. And the vast majority of deaths I've experienced in D&D-style games haven't been from a gradual failure of rolls, but unexpected critical hits from monsters causing outlier levels of damage inside a single turn. But I think I understand where the idea comes from better now.

For the TTRPGs I've played where combat is abstracted into relatively simple mechanics, they tend to have one or more of the following conceits baked into the rules:

1 - Death is not on the table as a consequence of combat.
2 - The stakes of the situation are discussed and agreed upon before the dice are rolled.
3 - Troupe play is in effect, where the death of an individual character isn't as important.
4 - The understanding that engaging in combat is itself a failure state of which death may be a consequence.

 

[Parmandur]

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.

Exactly this: I don't even hold it against 4E, I think it was very well designed for what they were going for, I just bounced off of it.

 

[FrogReaver]

You can chalk combat up to a single roll based on some sort of nebulous, all-encompassing "attack" stat or skill. Then compare rolls to see who got the higher number (no modifiers needed, even) and then adjudicate the results based on the intentions of the winning combatant.

Combat is just another action in a roleplaying game. Like crafting an item, or trying to convince someone to drop the ideology they've followed their whole life, or skinning an animal you've hunted. Depending on what players are looking for, and what a system is trying to do, there's no inherent need for any of these actions to be more complicated than a single roll. Expanding upon those things shows you what a system is interested in doing, or encourages players to do/not to do.

I’d disagree. It’s only takes 4 combats with an individual success chance of 70% each where the stakes are life and death for the players to end up with below a 25% chance of surviving even 4 such combats in such a game.

Because of this, Combat with life and death consequences doesn’t work well under such systems. Though combat with more story driven consequences can work very well.

 

[Parmandur]

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.

And on the other hand, a 5E pure miniatures wargame would be fairly lame, compared to other options in that field.

 

[Parmandur]

Speed was clearly one of the design goals. I remember the designers bragging about playing on their lunch break and having time for multiple combats in that time. That's probably also why so many of the MM monsters are just "bags of hit points" – less complexity means more speed. I'm also assuming that these fights were pretty simple, like "there are three orcs in the room".

But it turns out that many people like some complexity in their fights, and they enjoy grid-based combat because of its lack of ambiguity ("How many orcs can I hit with burning hands?"). And that means fights take longer.

Yeah, the stated design intention per Mike Mearls is that most fights will be over in two rounds, and rarely might go to 3 rounds. So 12-18 seconds in narrative time, and that can go very quickly in play time too.

 

[theCourier]

I’d disagree. It’s only takes 4 combats with an individual success chance of 70% each where the stakes are life and death for the players to end up with below a 25% chance of surviving even 4 such combats in such a game.

Because if this Combat with life and death consequences doesn’t work well under such systems. Though combat with more story driven consequences can work very well.

Doesn't have to end with character death if the system isn't going for that. And like I mentioned, combat can be something which a system doesn't encourage players to do, so those odds are there as a deterrent.

 

[Umbran]

You seem to be being a bit obtuse, here.

Could you not make it personal, please? Thanks much.

 

[FrogReaver]

Doesn't have to end with character death if the system isn't going for that. And like I mentioned, combat can be something which a system doesn't encourage players to do, so those odds are there as a deterrent.

Sure. But D&D at least in part is about dangerous monsters that try to kill you.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.

I cannot imagine wasting a bunch of time on non-combat rules in a game where the point is to do a wargame but you're one guy. Your conclusion being true seems damn near impossible, to me. I don't think anything but the earliest hand-written in notebooks versions of DnD would look like they do if the point wasn't pretty strongly to play a character, not just a unit. (before anyone can nitpick wording, "unit" is not a term which necessarily refers to multiple things, and in this case is being used to cover both "warband/platoon/whatever in a wargame" and "a knight on a chess board".

DnD has very clearly always been striving to be more than just "warhammer, but you just control a hero unit".

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.

You don't, perhaps. They obviously did.

And on the other hand, a 5E pure miniatures wargame would be fairly lame, compared to other options in that field.

It really would. A 5e game that was mostly combat would be pretty boring, even speaking as someone who enjoys 5e combat.