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

 

[Oofta]

Im guessing they will follow Paizo's move and just simplify XP as much as possible. Having an XP system can be good for encounter building and balancing out combats as guidelines. Also, its a traditional element that some folks love and a good nod to them to include it. Though, for all intents and purposes XP is likely dead.

Well XP for leveling died for me a couple of editions ago, so I wouldn't mind it. For a long time there has been general advice along the lines of giving people XP for overcoming an obstacle without resorting to combat and that non-combat encounters can reward XP. Since my games haven't been particularly combat heavy for a long time, I found myself just handing out XP for non-combat based on how quickly we wanted to level. Once I realized that I just started ignoring XP altogether.

 

[Parmandur]

Im guessing they will follow Paizo's move and just simplify XP as much as possible. Having an XP system can be good for encounter building and balancing out combats as guidelines. Also, its a traditional element that some folks love and a good nod to them to include it. Though, for all intents and purposes XP is likely dead.

I like Dungeon Crawl Classics scene based XP. Flattens out the reward pattern nicely.

 

[Eric V]

I remember how liberating it was to create a character who sucked at combat, a silver-tongued merchant, in 7th Sea in a friend's campaign. Just a normal guy without magic powers or fighting prowess. When talking about that initial experience with another group playing 5e D&D, they claimed that I could have done the same thing by just playing a Bard in 5e. It was a moment of incredulity for me for many reasons, including the obvious fact that bards cast spells. But also because every class in D&D 5e is designed to contribute to a fight, and the baseline fighting capability in 5e for even an unoptimized character is much higher than it is in other games.

I wonder what trying to make a character who can't contribute in combat at all would be like? A fighter who wears no armor, wields no weapons, and has put all their best stats in INT, WIS, and CHA? They're still going to get a fighting style, extra attacks, etc. though, so maybe not.

A wizard with no spells that can be used in combat, I suppose. There are probably enough spells with no use in combat that a high level wizard could still do it; there are subclasses whose features would effectively disappear, but it could be done...I guess. It would require a level of care similar to what optimizers do (for most classes), but it could happen. It's certainly not how the classes are designed, however.

 

[Eric V]

I've gotten to the point where I don't bother with easy encounters anymore. If I need one, it is more for narrative/story purposes. Otherwise, the resource attrition is so minimal it is pointless 90% of the time and just wastes valuable game time which could be spend in more exciting ways.

I also noticed a long time ago if they players have any chance to regroup after a fight, they are typically healed up to full hp (or close to it). So, unless an encounter is hard or deadly, the players know the PCs really aren't in any danger, and will win.

That is what makes combat boring to me, personally.

There must be a ton of people who like the no-danger conclusion-already-known resource-saving combats though; 4e's philosophy was to expressly ignore those kinds of trivial encounters and the masses (at least appeared to) hated it.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Let's talk about incentives in a game. These are the things the players are going to want to get out of playing the game. In D&D, the primary incentive is to level, because this offers more options in play, better options in play, and a feeling of advancement. XP is used as a tool here to tell players what things will get the reward of leveling. Primarily, in D&D, this is about killing things. Interestingly, one of the other incentive loops in D&D is getting loot, for similar reasons to leveling, and the primary way you get that is killing things. (Killing also represent defeating, driving off, etc). So the game offers XP for this, to incentivize these play loops with the rewards.

However, in 5e (and previous editions) XP is a pain in the backside. It's fiddly, big numbers, and you have to keep a ledger and add things together and if you forget to write down that number the GM spouts off then you've got to scramble later to figure out what you missed by comparing notes with other players (if you're allowed to). What a pain in the backside! So, quite often, you here about ditching XP.

So, let's look at what that does. The reward is still the same: leveling. We've removed XP, and this does something. With XP, the players can make choices that they know will result in XP -- if they manage resources and play to win fights, they get rewards (5e also offers the GM the option to do the same for non-combat things, but this acts pretty much the same). They can aim their play towards getting the XP to earn the reward. This is basic incentivizing (for those that are going to say they don't care about leveling, that's fine, too, but that's not how most players approach the game) -- if you do X you get Y. If this gets switched to milestone, or GM says levelling, then this doesn't change -- there's still an incentive, we've just moved it from something players can directly choose to something else. In this case, the incentive moves toward pleasing the GM. You need to accomplish the goal the GM has set, or do enough things that the GM wants to gain the reward and level the character. That's somewhat distorting of the game. There's not much surprise that almost every single instance of milestone leveling I see references is attached to Trad play. Nothing at all wrong with this -- I tend to play in a Trad style when I run 5e and I also will use milestone leveling, so this isn't a dig at this, just an examination of it.

So, ditching XP has some consequence to play -- it effectively redirects some of the choices the players make to earn rewards from play loop orienting things to externally oriented based on what the GM wants to see before award. This, again, isn't a bad thing in an of itself, but something that maybe should be assessed. If you want to give players more control over their character's directions, but don't want to deal with XP, then it might be that choosing milestone leveling might run counter to your desires but not be obvious that it does so. How can this be addressed then? Is there a way to use milestones while leaving things more in the players' hands? Yup, borrow the personal quests from 4e. Let the players pick what goals will get them milestones. Of course this should be a conversation in D&D, with the GM offering advice on how to work things in, or break something up into reasonable chunks.

 

[DND_Reborn]

There must be a ton of people who like the no-danger conclusion-already-known resource-saving combats though; 4e's philosophy was to expressly ignore those kinds of trivial encounters and the masses (at least appeared to) hated it.

Shrug

It comes down to what you want out of the game. Facing a ton of easy and moderate encounters is fine if that is what your group likes. To be clear I am not advocating death-match encounters all the time--those would get boring, too, and probably too stressful to remain fun.

I use easy encounters for quick points, where something bad could happen if the PCs mess up (such as a guard alerting others the PCs are there!). If there is no "meaningful consequence" then I use them very sparingly and run them more as a narrative.

 

[Eric V]

Shrug

It comes down to what you want out of the game. Facing a ton of easy and moderate encounters is fine if that is what your group likes. To be clear I am not advocating death-match encounters all the time--those would get boring, too, and probably too stressful to remain fun.

I use easy encounters for quick points, where something bad could happen if the PCs mess up (such as a guard alerting others the PCs are there!). If there is no "meaningful consequence" then I use them very sparingly and run them more as a narrative.

Same. Since we only have 2.5 hours to play a week (and it's online), it would seem a bit wasteful to use the time for an encounter like that when narrating it does the same thing.

 

[Dausuul]

There must be a ton of people who like the no-danger conclusion-already-known resource-saving combats though; 4e's philosophy was to expressly ignore those kinds of trivial encounters and the masses (at least appeared to) hated it.

4E made a whole lot of changes to a whole lot of things. Sussing out which ones resulted in fan blowback is not easy to do. Many 4E-isms were carried forward to 5E without issue.

Moreover, 4E did not apply its own philosophy consistently in the early adventures. "Keep on the Shadowfell" was a godawful slog because it was an adventure built around attrition fights, in an edition which did not support that in the slightest. People hated KotS, with good reason... but was it because of the edition's choice to not support attrition fights, or the adventure's choice to use them anyway?

 

[tetrasodium]

I think that some of 5e's design choices discourage gm's from using xp, specifically magic items are optional vrs the magic item churn of the past & the fact that leveling by exp feels faster* than in the past. It feels faster because players either blast through gobs of "level appropriate challenges" with trivial ease at lightning speed for lots of cumulative exp or the players burn through fewer "effort appropriate" LOLdeadly no risk encounters that involve some resource expenditure alongside an even larger mountain of experience. In the past magic item churn ensured that the GM had a pull rope for emergency type safeguard that only required them to not supply the fuel needed to continue zooming through levels & focus the game on anything else while 5e has "great we got a magic weapon, we are good till 20" & "cool bob your dump stat is now 19". Without the safeguard & an exp/broken CR system that only runs on two flavors of rocket fuel fleeing to milestone starts looking pretty attractive even for a GM that wants to use exp.

 

[payn]

So, ditching XP has some consequence to play -- it effectively redirects some of the choices the players make to earn rewards from play loop orienting things to externally oriented based on what the GM wants to see before award. This, again, isn't a bad thing in an of itself, but something that maybe should be assessed. If you want to give players more control over their character's directions, but don't want to deal with XP, then it might be that choosing milestone leveling might run counter to your desires but not be obvious that it does so. How can this be addressed then? Is there a way to use milestones while leaving things more in the players' hands? Yup, borrow the personal quests from 4e. Let the players pick what goals will get them milestones. Of course this should be a conversation in D&D, with the GM offering advice on how to work things in, or break something up into reasonable chunks.

I experienced the opposite. My players went hunting the XP. It drove all their decisions in mechanical ways. They never acted as they thought the character would act or pursued lines that made sense to the story. They often would waste time on trivial pursuits because it meant more XP. They thought that if its included by the GM, it must be necessary.

When I went to milestone, the players took a more adventure overview look at things. They started following leads that made sense for their characters. They stopped going on tangents that made little sense. They became more focused on achieving goals of both the character and the story. They forgot all about XP and felt more free than they ever did playing before.

Its true, as GM, I decide the milestone. Though, its usually quite obvious to the players. The adventure has goals and as long as the players are working towards that goal they will achieve it. Its entirely up to them how they get there.