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

 

[tetrasodium]

We haven't found that to be the case. Quick encounters get met with Cantrips and the least expenditure of resources as possible. To actually get PCs to use resources, then the challenge needs to be higher than CR would indicate, then the combat slows down. Otherwise, focus firing down one or two monsters in a "quick" encounter does absolutely nothing for wearing out a party, no matter how many get thrown at them. "Just use Cantrips" (or other non resources actions) is the frequent refrain. I mean, I can certainly have them be beaten in 1-2 rounds, but then there is less than zero threat to the party, so why bother - no tension, no story, just wacking monsters. Yawn. But DnD certainly isn't about combat, no sir. Just 6-8 "per day" to "wear them down". Shrug.

I guess our table's experience must just be so far out on the fringes of most tables... I don't know.

Your table is not a fringe. The "quick [popcorn] encounters" expend no resources & are just pointless in story as well as lacking any hope of holding anyone's interest at the table.

 

[Parmandur]

We haven't found that to be the case. Quick encounters get met with Cantrips and the least expenditure of resources as possible. To actually get PCs to use resources, then the challenge needs to be higher than CR would indicate, then the combat slows down. Otherwise, focus firing down one or two monsters in a "quick" encounter does absolutely nothing for wearing out a party, no matter how many get thrown at them. "Just use Cantrips" (or other non resources actions) is the frequent refrain. I mean, I can certainly have them be beaten in 1-2 rounds, but then there is less than zero threat to the party, so why bother - no tension, no story, just wacking monsters. Yawn. But DnD certainly isn't about combat, no sir. Just 6-8 "per day" to "wear them down". Shrug.

I guess our table's experience must just be so far out on the fringes of most tables... I don't know.

There is a balance to find to get the right challenge level, but 1-2 rounds is how the designers assume everything plays for balance purposes. Given enough little fights, even small resource expenditures vuild up, which is more interesting to me than drawing out one fight.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Now I want to look back at an old thread that complained 4E was too focused on combat for the purpose of comparing responses...

 

[Ovinomancer]

@Ovinomancer - it appears that we're just talking past each other now because I have no idea why you think I'm not agreeing with you.

Probably the hyperbole.

It's time for me to unsubscribe from this thread because, honestly, it's not going anywhere and it's just retreading the same things over and over again. AFAIC, the point has been pretty clearly demonstrated that D&D is mostly about combat. Which was the basic question.

Thanks for the convo folks.

 

[Oofta]

Now I want to look back at an old thread that complained 4E was too focused on combat for the purpose of comparing responses...

Well 4E tried to come up with a universal system to handle out of combat scenarios, skill challenges. It may have been well intentioned but it sucked a lot of spontaneity and creativity out of the game.

Maybe other people figured out how to use it more effectively but it never really worked for us for most things.

 

[Parmandur]

Well 4E tried to come up with a universal system to handle out of combat scenarios, skill challenges. It may have been well intentioned but it sucked a lot of spontaneity and creativity out of the game.

Maybe other people figured out how to use it more effectively but it never really worked for us for most things.

Interesting idea, but in practice restrictive and didn't even give as much practical guidance as 5E.

 

[Oofta]

Interesting idea, but in practice restrictive and didn't even give as much practical guidance as 5E.

I still use some of the core concepts now and then. However my implementation is always a lot more flexible and situation dependant. If someone comes up with a good solution, it may just end the challenge. If people fail too often, there may just have a cost of HP, exhaustion or some other appropriate penalty but the challenge may continue.

But it never really worked for us in a lot of scenarios so it has to be the right kind of challenge.

 

[Aldarc]

The irony here is that people spent considerable time and effort comparing word count and page count to state, quite strongly, that this meant that D&D wasn't focused on combat. Yet, when we actually talk about page count or word count, apparently it doesn't matter.

Page count can admittedly be deceptive because it doesn't tell us the full picture. It can provide insight, but it requires additional context. A hypothetical RPG may have a 100 pages of rules, but only 10 pages of which are used 90 percent of the time in the game with the other 90 pages being consulted 10 percent of the time. Nor does page count necessarily give us a good sense of the meat of the content itself. Getting hung-up on the "90 percent" criticism is, IMHO, a mistake for all parties as it doesn't give a clear picture. I have already talked about how percentages can be deceptive whether we are talking about action scenes in Marvel films or vocabulary origins in the English language.

I don't disagree that D&D has a strong focus on combat at its core gameplay. D&D 5e supports three pillars of play, but those three pillars are not equally mechanically supported by its design. But here we can look at things like the historical development of the D&D 5e engine and its design architecture, orientation of class design and character options, @hawkeyefan drawing attention to the character sheet, adventure and encounter design, gameplay loops/procedures, etc. All these game elements provide clues about what the core game wants us to care most about.

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I was also thinking of the article that @talien wrote about treating Session 0 as a trailer. The Avengers movie may only have 20 percent of combat as part of its total run time, but the trailer ramps that action up and hones in on it in the trailer. Marketing at least clearly wants us to care about the action, and even in non-action scenes in the trailer we are often reminded that these superheroes are characters oriented around that action: e.g., look at Thor's hammer, look at Hawkeye's bow, look at Iron Man's suit, etc. What would a trailer for D&D 5e try getting us excited for? I suspect Combat >> Exploration > Social.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Last night we spent about an hour improvising a bad play in WBtW. We didn't roll any dice and we didn't achieve any objective. We just had fun.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well 4E tried to come up with a universal system to handle out of combat scenarios, skill challenges. It may have been well intentioned but it sucked a lot of spontaneity and creativity out of the game.

Maybe other people figured out how to use it more effectively but it never really worked for us for most things.

This explains a lot of just how different your perception of 4e is from my own.

Not a knock, I legitimately just think I get where you are coming from more, reading this.

I do wonder about how you dealt with situations where a skill challenge didn’t work, but that’s just curiosity. We definitely didn’t use them for all out of combat situations with stakes and variable outcomes, just for most of the important and complex ones. Things where several skill checks or a group check felt better than a single roll from one character.

We also outright ignored stuff like every PC going turn by turn, and not being allowed to use the same skill.

Between skills, skill challenges, rituals, and some of the weirder wondrous items, we felt like out of combat was very well covered.