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

 

[payn]

I mentioned it uptrend, but I would point to the Dungeon Crawl Classics XP system as a balance between XP and milestones, by way if micro milestones (get 1-4 XP for getting through every room in a dungeon or social encounter...no matter the solution or path forwards).

For an OSR game, I can certainly live with this alternative. If Im digging in on a campaign of political intrigue, i'm not going to bother with it.

 

[Parmandur]

For an OSR game, I can certainly live with this alternative. If Im digging in on a campaign of political intrigue, i'm not going to bother with it.

Actually, it works for that, too, and by design. The unit of milestones then is scenes. Have a tense negotiation with the Imperial ambassador that goes well? Everyone gets 3 XP. Sneak into the Viscounts room at bight and discover evidence of a conspiracy? Everyone gets 2 XP.

DCC is an "OSR" game, but they want to incentize playing out old school genre stories, not just fights.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I dont understand the problematic part. Why players don't seem to have agency in this?

Firstly, I didn't say that there was a problematic part. I gave recommendations for helping aligning goals. The difference is that I wasn't making a value judgement, but acknowledging that people have different values and how you might use a milestone system in a slightly different way to help align if it was a problem for you.

Secondly, agency is reduced when you take choices away from players, but also, and this is important, agency is not a universal good. Games by their nature restrict agency in myriad ways. How and why agency is restricted is often much more important than the amount of it. Here, agency is reduced because what gives rewards shifts from an openly known and fixed set of circumstances that the players can then choose to pursue to only those things that the GM selects. This isn't, again, bad on it's face, but it is slightly less agency -- the GM has intruded into the decision space and wields fiat.

Look, in your example, there was nothing that prevented players from following character goals over prioritizing earning XP from combats. The decision space was free, the rewards were known, and players could choose. They did choose, but it lead to a game that wasn't fulfilling for you and presumably at least some of them. So you made a change, and instead of combat being the path to the reward, you select what path is available. The players still have the same options -- they can still murderhobo, but they will no longer earn rewards for it. So, in that sense, their agency isn't altered. However, in the prior mode of XP for combat, the triggers for earning XP were clear and well known and so the players had full knowledge of what they could do to earn XP. When it moved to the GM's side (and milestones are usually obscured from the players so as to give the GM better control over pacing by controlling the timing of leveling) they lost knowledge of exactly what was needed, and instead knew that if they followed the hooks they'd get the levels. This left less direct incentivization to play -- they will be afforded opportunities by the GM to achieve the GM's goals and gain levels, so there's less need to push towards getting the rewards. They no longer need to push as hard. This opens up space to pursue less tangible play rewards because the rat race is over and you can indulge in play that pleases aesthetically rather than drive towards the less pleasing XP triggers for combat (less pleasing being assumed for your group based on your description -- other groups can find combat the most pleasing and would react differently). This softening and loosening means that decisions are less important to outcomes, in general, so agency is reduced. Again, I don't think this is a bad thing at all, agency should not be prioritized without reason and intent.

So, I think it's probably a really good choice on your part to move to milestone leveling for your group. It seems like this better aligns your game to what your table enjoys. Agency isn't a fixed good -- it should be priced according to what it can achieve. Here, I think that your choice to slightly reduce player agency by adding in more GM agency to direct the game works to create a better game for you. That should always be the goal, not some myth perfect pursuit of agency.

Agency is a useful thing to look at in game design, because it does have input into value judgements by players. Some players value it more than others. Further, we can look at a game and do a pretty solid analysis of how agency operates in that game by looking at where choices that do things operate and what they can do. However, that analysis cannot tell you if this is a good game for you or not -- only you can tell that. I like some games with lots of agency quite a lot, and others with lots of agency not so much. I also enjoy some games with little agency. Agency should not be the touchstone it appears to be -- it is not a universal good thing to have more agency.

 

[Staffan]

I'd love it if D&D came up with some compromise between their traditional XP system and milestone XP. Something that actually can be considered a system, but which is actually easily managed at the table, and on a character sheet. It should be as easy as tracking arrows or any other resource.

You could just do smaller milestones and require more of them. One encounter (which can be in either pillar) = one tick. Particular plot point = an arbitrary number of ticks. Ten ticks = level up. Or something like that.

It should however be noted that the 5e XP table in particular has some sophistication built into it that's easily missed. Notably, level 1 to 2 takes almost no XP at all, and level 2 to 3 is pretty fast as well. That's because those are essentially tutorial levels. It also acts as a subtle multi-class penalty, because after all you're paying thousands of XP for a benefit that normally costs like 300 XP.

After that things settle down a bit, but things speed up significantly in tier 3 when things go from about 15 medium encounters per level to about 10. I reckon this is because traditionally the "sweet spot" is level 5-10, and the XP table is designed to keep you there longer. Also, I think there's an element of "a high-level fight is more complex so it takes longer so you shouldn't need as many of them to level up". This is unlike 3e and IIRC 4e where the XP requirements and rewards were designed around a constant number of equal-level encounters per level.

Of course, one may or may not care about this, but it's always good to analyze a system before you mess around with it. A good starting point would be to divide the XP difference per level with the number of XP for a particular level in the encounter building guidelines.

I dont understand the problematic part. Why players don't seem to have agency in this?

For some people, milestone leveling feels like "Good boy, here's a cookie" – particularly if it's tied to particular plot developments ("kill the boss, level up"). Traditional XP can feel more objective, in that it rewards the PCs for doing whatever instead of for following the DM's plot. That can of course be fixed, at least somewhat, by using a "lesser milestone" system similar to the one above where it's still "do stuff, get tick, get enough ticks, level up."

I think this somewhat relates to the distinction between sandboxes and railroads. On a railroad, it's easy to give a level at each stop, but it also diminishes the players' agency. In a sandbox, everything is up to the PCs, so there aren't obvious things to tie milestones to.

 

[Ovinomancer]

That's because the "role-play is superior to roll-play, which makes me superior for being a real role-player" mind-virus remains alive and well and endemic in the gaming population at large.

I don't believe for a minute that D&D (regardless of edition) is anywhere near 90% combat for most groups. (For example, I'd peg my own play-style at 10% tedious logistics, 75% tense exploration, 10% thrilling combat, 5% banal thespianism.) But is there still an attitude about it? Do people still look down on tactical combat as "empty" hack and slash? On gaining loot and levels as "empty" numbers-go-up? On any sort of character optimization as deplorable munchkinism? You can bet your bottom dollar they still do.

"[B}anal thespiansim"

In another discussion elsewhere, we tend to call this "cosplaying." It's just expression of a character for the purpose of representing that character ideally. The character concept is fixed, and only changes at the wish of the player, if they feel they've found a way to better represent the character ideal. The concept is never challenged by play. It's like putting on a cool character costume and showing it off to others with the tag lines and neat poses! And we use this term not to denigrate this, because we all engage in it at various times. It's cool to cosplay!

 

[payn]

Oh I get it now. In the sense of agency you are talking about mechanics and leveling itself and not role playing agency. I was thinking about how the mechanics of XP often had the players choosing to do really left turn types of things (often quite stupidly) because it meant an XP reward. The players were only interacting with the game in ways that garnered mechanical benefits. For example, clearing out every single room of every dungeon because there might be a trap to disarm, a secret door to find, or an enemy to fight. Often sticking to this game loop despite finding the clues necessary to move on. Also, forgoing things that seem interesting to pursue, like role playing with an NPC, because it doesn't seem to provide any XP. So many lost opportunities and wasted time...

 

[Ovinomancer]

Oh I get it now. In the sense of agency you are talking about mechanics and leveling itself and not role playing agency. I was thinking about how the mechanics of XP often had the players choosing to do really left turn types of things (often quite stupidly) because it meant an XP reward. The players were only interacting with the game in ways that garnered mechanical benefits. For example, clearing out every single room of every dungeon because there might be a trap to disarm, a secret door to find, or an enemy to fight. Often sticking to this game loop despite finding the clues necessary to move on. Also, forgoing things that seem interesting to pursue, like role playing with an NPC, because it doesn't seem to provide any XP. So many lost opportunities and wasted time...

Yup. Although, for what it's worth, I don't agree with separating agency into categories. And this is because I can't really evaluate how an increase in some "roleplaying agency" compares to some decrease in "mechanical agency." These aren't comparable. So, I just stick with agency, and note how a given change affects player's ability to make meaningful decisions. Also, once you get out of games where character is independent of the game played (like D&D, where your idea of your character isn't at all tied to anything the game does), mechanics and roleplaying can often be closely tied. Like, say, Blades, where you earn Traumas by losing all your stress boxes, and this adds a negative character trait to your PC. The extent of this is that you can now earn XP (which are awarded in units of 1 and are valuable at that resolution) by engaging with that trauma in play in a way that causes problems. Hard to extract mechanics from roleplaying here.

 

[payn]

Yup. Although, for what it's worth, I don't agree with separating agency into categories. And this is because I can't really evaluate how an increase in some "roleplaying agency" compares to some decrease in "mechanical agency." These aren't comparable. So, I just stick with agency, and note how a given change affects player's ability to make meaningful decisions. Also, once you get out of games where character is independent of the game played (like D&D, where your idea of your character isn't at all tied to anything the game does), mechanics and roleplaying can often be closely tied. Like, say, Blades, where you earn Traumas by losing all your stress boxes, and this adds a negative character trait to your PC. The extent of this is that you can now earn XP (which are awarded in units of 1 and are valuable at that resolution) by engaging with that trauma in play in a way that causes problems. Hard to extract mechanics from roleplaying here.

For me its important because I have a better understanding if I have a player who is bummed out by no mechanical XP chart. I get an understanding of what they are looking for. So, I can either explain my GM style, adjust my playstyle, or go our own ways. The two are not the same thing even though they may be related to one another.

I don't hate mechanics that drive RP, if fact I prefer them to straight up encounter pass systems. I still prefer a more organic approach that doesn't tie any mechanics to RP. It just feels inauthentic to me at the table. Though, I totally understand that some players need to be lead to the mt dew so they can drink. If it gets players out of the shell, im all for it.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yeap, here is the golden nugget right here. The problem is everybody thinks D&D has to cater to their preferences. Its understandable because pre-internets its was play D&D or maybe, maaaaaybe find a group to play something else. This town our community lives in is just not big enough for alternatives. So, now folks have become accustomed to fighting over what the one big game should be. It's also why folks get hyper defensive of folks saying what D&D is, when they think it isnt.

I don't think that It's that simple. Look back at the post you quoted in 767. " Do people still look down on tactical combat as "empty" hack and slash? On gaining loot and levels as "empty" numbers-go-up? On any sort of character optimization as deplorable munchkinism? You can bet your bottom dollar they still do."... All of those things require mechanics that support rather than thwart them. Sure you can give out "loot" but bounded accuracy, advantage/disadvantage , attunement slots, & very few if any real choices to be made over the PC's levels with nearly all of them so huge that they tend to be "hmm... GWM or... actor". Magic item churn, body slots, regular choices about/during character advancement, & basically all of the underpinnings for subjective improvements in loot don't even show up as optional rules or they have optional rules for cornerstone elements that deliberately thwart them. Even something like the no/few magic items being a hypothetically desirable thing is easy to handle with an optional rule without needing to excise mechanical support for the alternative, we know that because it's been done before in the old darksun stuff by giving PCs bonuses that would otherwise come from magic items.

Those elements are not antithetical to social & exploration pillar type stuff, they can even be used to support & empower those things but were excised to enforce one specific style of combat heavy campaign above all others. Yes there are things like pathfinder dcc & kickstarted alternatives like levelup, but this thread has an awful lot of people crediting those kinds of omissions from 5e's ruleset as a strength for 5e because it allows the gm to build the missing part whole cloth instead of modifying or replacing an existing part.

 

[payn]

Those elements are not antithetical to social & exploration pillar type stuff, they can even be used to support & empower those things but were excised to enforce one specific style of combat heavy campaign above all others. Yes there are things like pathfinder dcc & kickstarted alternatives like levelup, but this thread has an awful lot of people crediting those kinds of omissions from 5e's ruleset as a strength for 5e because it allows the gm to build the missing part whole cloth instead of modifying or replacing an existing part.

...and I aint with those people. It aint no thang to me anymore because I gave up on D&D having to be the perfect game, the only game, my game. Its actually quite freeing because you can admit things about the game (both that you agree and disagree with) more honestly.