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

 

[Ovinomancer]

For you I will redo my sentence,
« DM guide give enough tools to run any non combat encounters. »

Okay. Where do I find how many converts I can get by preaching on a street corner for a week?

There aren't any tools for this. The only way to answer this is to make an ad hoc GM Says ruling that may or may not involve something that is in the rules. 5e telling you to make it up isn't a tool in 5e -- that's something you could do anyway.

4ed try to give more structure to non combat encounter with the skill challenge. It’s a way.
past editions favor a lot of supplement rules, for handling church, warfare, economics, politics, there is room for dozens of splat book to write up. It is still doable in 5ed.
But for what I see in 5ed there is a lot of space for DM fiat. For some it seem a shame, but overall it seem to be popular.

I'm not putting a value judgement on GM fiat. I'm pointing out that it's exercise is showing a place where 5e doesn't support something, not a place it does. As I've said a few times already, this is fine.

 

[Cadence]

Okay. Where do I find how many converts I can get by preaching on a street corner for a week?

There aren't any tools for this. The only way to answer this is to make an ad hoc GM Says ruling that may or may not involve something that is in the rules. 5e telling you to make it up isn't a tool in 5e -- that's something you could do anyway.

What game do you think has the most detailed rules for that, and how much decision does the DM still have in the outcome?

 

[Ovinomancer]

What game do you think has the most detailed rules for that, and how much decision does the DM still have in the outcome?

Rules, not more detailed, but rules. FATE handles this. Cortex Prime. PbtA can do it -- Stonetop has a few mechanics that actually address this kind of thing. Blades in the Dark handles it as well -- there's even a Cult crew. 4e could do it with a skill challenge and a quick discussion about what the results look like, so 50/50. Probably many others I can't think of right now.

As far as asking how much decision does the GM still have in the outcome, I don't understand the question. What are you looking for? I mean, 5e has lots of mechanics where the GM has little decision in the outcome, and lots of places that say "GM Says." We're talking about systems that don't just say "GM Says" so any mechanic would restrain GM freedom to Say to some degree. This can't be a bad thing, else we need to look at 5e's combat engine where the GM has very little, if any, Say.

 

[Cadence]

Rules, not more detailed, but rules. FATE handles this. Cortex Prime. PbtA can do it -- Stonetop has a few mechanics that actually address this kind of thing. Blades in the Dark handles it as well -- there's even a Cult crew. 4e could do it with a skill challenge and a quick discussion about what the results look like, so 50/50. Probably many others I can't think of right now.

As far as asking how much decision does the GM still have in the outcome, I don't understand the question. What are you looking for? I mean, 5e has lots of mechanics where the GM has little decision in the outcome, and lots of places that say "GM Says." We're talking about systems that don't just say "GM Says" so any mechanic would restrain GM freedom to Say to some degree. This can't be a bad thing, else we need to look at 5e's combat engine where the GM has very little, if any, Say.

Your request was for "Where do I find how many converts I can get by preaching on a street corner for a week?".

Did 5e remove the general mechanic of the DM picking a difficulty level and having the character roll something like Chr+some skill, and then giving a number of converts based on what they felt was reasonable based on the roll?

Pick any of those systems (I have only played a bit of Fate and 4e from among them). How is the particular number of followers gained determined?

 

[tetrasodium]

Your request was for "Where do I find how many converts I can get by preaching on a street corner for a week?".

Did 5e remove the general mechanic of the DM picking a difficulty level and having the character roll something like Chr+some skill, and then giving a number of converts based on what they felt was reasonable based on the roll?

Pick any of those systems (I have only played a bit of Fate and 4e from among them). How is the particular number of followers gained determined?

I actually posted earlier in the thread about a mechanic d&d once had that would provide some assistance with the build a church preaching thing complete with examples of using it in a game

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...

www.enworld.org

Edit:in fate you could do it just like setting up aspects or maybe with a stress track or with themed stunts

 

[Krachek]

Okay. Where do I find how many converts I can get by preaching on a street corner for a week?

There aren't any tools for this. The only way to answer this is to make an ad hoc GM Says ruling that may or may not involve something that is in the rules. 5e telling you to make it up isn't a tool in 5e -- that's something you could do anyway.


I'm not putting a value judgement on GM fiat. I'm pointing out that it's exercise is showing a place where 5e doesn't support something, not a place it does. As I've said a few times already, this is fine.

You are right, DnD don’t provide precise answer to preaching and many other concerns.
They simply give general rules for handling that. It leave space for designer and DM to create additional rules. They even give an example making new rules using the chase case. Unfortunately it is not very good nor popular, but there is room to create hundreds or thousands of such rules to handle every aspect of adventurer life. Each monsters can be add with numerous tables to handle tactics, morale, negotiating and so on. Ultimatly DM would only be a dice roller and apply given charts.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Your request was for "Where do I find how many converts I can get by preaching on a street corner for a week?".

Yes. How does this relate to amount of GM input?

Did 5e remove the general mechanic of the DM picking a difficulty level and having the character roll something like Chr+some skill, and then giving a number of converts based on what they felt was reasonable based on the roll?

There is no such general mechanic. You're confusing using an ability check as part of a possible answer to the question with ability checks being THE answer. The reality is that you've ad hoc altered how the mechanic generally works to make it fit, with a result based on the roll -- this isn't actually how ability checks work. They are succeed or fail, binary state generators. Altering this is altering the mechanic. So you have to ad hoc determine, based on pretty much nothing, what a successful result is and what a failure result it, or just pick some categories for various result bins and do that (pretty far off mechanic at that point) and then use a roll. But this roll could be any other kind of roll -- a d100 roll, or something else. There's nothing here to tell me how to adjudicate this so anything I pick is already ad hoc, and anything I pick is also equally correct.

Pick any of those systems (I have only played a bit of Fate and 4e from among them). How is the particular number of followers gained determined?

In Blades, it would be gaining an asset. Such followers would be temporary unless you continued to court them, at which point they become automatic (so long as you continue to preach regularly, your converts stay). You would roll the appropriate action, with 1-3 being a Crew Tier -1 result, 4-5 being Tier, 6 being Tier +1, and crits being Tier +2. You could also spend a coin to improve the tier result. You would then have acquired a gang of cultists of equal scale to the Tier result. Depending on the crew tier, this will give you bands of results to represent how many people you've gotten. Zero would be 1-2 people. 1 would be 3-6 people. 2 would be 12. 3 would be 20. 4 would be 40. 5 would be 80. And 6 would be 160. The GM can flavor this as they want and say something like "okay, you're crew tier 2 and got a 6... that's 21 people." The 1 extra person is not really mechanically relevant and so becomes flavor.

 

[Cadence]

In Blades, it would be gaining an asset. Such followers would be temporary unless you continued to court them, at which point they become automatic (so long as you continue to preach regularly, your converts stay). You would roll the appropriate action, with 1-3 being a Crew Tier -1 result, 4-5 being Tier, 6 being Tier +1, and crits being Tier +2. You could also spend a coin to improve the tier result. You would then have acquired a gang of cultists of equal scale to the Tier result. Depending on the crew tier, this will give you bands of results to represent how many people you've gotten. Zero would be 1-2 people. 1 would be 3-6 people. 2 would be 12. 3 would be 20. 4 would be 40. 5 would be 80. And 6 would be 160. The GM can flavor this as they want and say something like "okay, you're crew tier 2 and got a 6... that's 21 people." The 1 extra person is not really mechanically relevant and so becomes flavor.

Thank you! (I now have the urge to go reread some Fafhrd and Mouser).

So the book specifies those numbers you gave (0=1-2, 1=3-6, etc...) for tier 2?

In the example you gave, what determines it was tier 2? (Is this where the general attitude of the city to the characters religion comes in, for example? Or is this based on something about the characters background/traits/abilities?)

So tier 2 with a 6 goes to tier 3. Could the GM pick any number from 20-39 or does just below next tier go well beyond flavor?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yes. How does this relate to amount of GM input?

There is no such general mechanic. You're confusing using an ability check as part of a possible answer to the question with ability checks being THE answer. The reality is that you've ad hoc altered how the mechanic generally works to make it fit, with a result based on the roll -- this isn't actually how ability checks work. They are succeed or fail, binary state generators. Altering this is altering the mechanic. So you have to ad hoc determine, based on pretty much nothing, what a successful result is and what a failure result it, or just pick some categories for various result bins and do that (pretty far off mechanic at that point) and then use a roll. But this roll could be any other kind of roll -- a d100 roll, or something else. There's nothing here to tell me how to adjudicate this so anything I pick is already ad hoc, and anything I pick is also equally correct.

In Blades, it would be gaining an asset. Such followers would be temporary unless you continued to court them, at which point they become automatic (so long as you continue to preach regularly, your converts stay). You would roll the appropriate action, with 1-3 being a Crew Tier -1 result, 4-5 being Tier, 6 being Tier +1, and crits being Tier +2. You could also spend a coin to improve the tier result. You would then have acquired a gang of cultists of equal scale to the Tier result. Depending on the crew tier, this will give you bands of results to represent how many people you've gotten. Zero would be 1-2 people. 1 would be 3-6 people. 2 would be 12. 3 would be 20. 4 would be 40. 5 would be 80. And 6 would be 160. The GM can flavor this as they want and say something like "okay, you're crew tier 2 and got a 6... that's 21 people." The 1 extra person is not really mechanically relevant and so becomes flavor.

@Cadence

As a follow up to this, the Blades mechanic I presented would be a done time activity. These are managed inside their own economy. A crew could also do this via a score, but it would be hard to summarize that because it would involve multiple steps of negotiations and rolls and the outcome is massively variable.

That said, this DTA wouldn't be completely mechanical. Blades runs on the fiction generated, so details would need to be hung on these -- where did you go to preach (ie, what neighborhood might these folk come from), what kind of people did you attract (stating the cultist asset would mean giving them at least one positive and one negative tag, like "loyal, unreliable" would represent a cohort that would not betray you but also might not always be available for a specified reason), and if you spent a coin, what did that look like (did you hand out bread, wine, offer pins, etc.). These are also important to the game because they create the hooks that future play hangs upon.

 

[Cadence]

That said, this DTA wouldn't be completely mechanical. Blades runs on the fiction generated, so details would need to be hung on these -- where did you go to preach (ie, what neighborhood might these folk come from), what kind of people did you attract (stating the cultist asset would mean giving them at least one positive and one negative tag, like "loyal, unreliable" would represent a cohort that would not betray you but also might not always be available for a specified reason), and if you spent a coin, what did that look like (did you hand out bread, wine, offer pins, etc.). These are also important to the game because they create the hooks that future play hangs upon.

Following up to my questions in #878 again, who or what process determines what the positive and negative tags are? Similarly to what counts as a coin?