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

 

[Krachek]

Cookbook: "This cookbook will not tell you how to cook, or prepare, meals for dinner, but we will tell you that dinner is an important part of the set of daily meals -- you should absolutely have dinner! But we're not giving you any ideas about dinner, you're on your own. Hopefully, you've had dinner before and so have some basis for figuring it out, or someone else can teach you how to make dinner, or perhaps you can watch some videos online about dinner, but there will be no discussion of dinner here."

Fans: "That Cookbook is just the best for making dinner!"

I don't get it.

you have absolutly reason.

 

[Ovinomancer]

It doesn't imply anything about you though nor does it state anything the experiences of other as a universal. It states that I, Aldarc, and Aldarc alone can be surprised by this. If you can't figure out that I am speaking solely for my personal experiences and no one else's, then there is no point at all at discussing this matter further.

Can I be surprised without social mechanics? Yes, sure. That's a banal point to concede. But I have personally found that social mechanics have contributed to my personal sense of surprise as part of playing to find out what happens.

In D&D I may occasionally be surprised by a turn of events, and even less occasionally feel that I have to scramble to get ahead of it, but mostly my surprise will be from player action declarations. This is even muted, because any such surprise is immediately subject to GM veto or softening. If it's something the GM thinks shouldn't happen (note, not couldn't, but shouldn't) then the GM has the authority and expectation to blunt or block it. So "surprise" in this case is pretty much always up to the GM to decide they want to engage.

In games that feature robust social mechanics, the GM loses this ability to blunt or block an outcome. They can both be surprised AND have to engage that surprise and follow through with it.

In other words, in D&D, the amount of fluidity in the game outcomes (outside of combat) is up to the GM. They decide what gets picked up and run with. In games that feature robust resolution mechanics across all pillars of play, the GM loses this control over the fluidity of game outcomes as that gets ported onto the mechanics. When talking about how the GM can be "surprised" by play, this framework applies.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It doesn't imply anything about you though nor does it state anything the experiences of other as a universal. It states that I, Aldarc, and Aldarc alone can be surprised by this.

No, you are being disingenuous. You clearly stated that the alternative to mechanical resolution was:

dictating or coercing

 

[Oofta]

That's not what's being said. No one is saying you aren't playing D&D unless you are following a rule.

That's what ovinomancer was saying, as far as I can tell. I'm not really sure what they were getting at though. They've blocked me though so I may never know.

What is being said is that the absence of rules cannot be claimed as a strength of a system. Additionally, it's very hard to claim that a system focuses or supports things which it doesn't have rules for. You absolutely ARE playing D&D when you freeform your way through a social encounter because D&D as a system doesn't really provide any sort of framework to resolve things any other way. As @doctorbadwolf points out, in my guard example or his, there are three different, mutually exclusive resolutions - pure freeform; single check, pass/fail; extended series of checks - and they are all "playing D&D".

Strength and preference are closely associated. I like the way the rules work now, for me it's a strength. For others it is not. Yes, there are different results. There are different groups, the guards have different motivations and goals that are more complex than can be easily encompassed by rules. That to me, is a strength. That you have to have a human intelligence, not a set of rules deciding outcome. It's also discussed in The Role of the Dice in the DMG, it's group preference.

Which brings us around to the point of the thread. When you start combat, there aren't three different resolution methods. There's only one and it's extremely detailed. When you try a social encounter (regardless of the example) the rules are very vague. Now, you can claim that's a feature, fair enough. That's just personal preference. To be honest, in play, when playing D&D, I would obviously do the same as you or @doctorbadwolf - pick one of those three resolution methods that seems applicable at the time. But, in other systems, I would have concrete frameworks for resolving things.

There are nearly infinite ways combat can be resolved. The actions of the individuals in the combat are more constrained, but even then I allow things that are not strictly covered by the rules now and then. There's no "I swing from the chandelier" rule. For the most part I would have no idea how to resolve combat actions without rules.

On the other hand, I have a decent grasp of how people think. At least good enough for the game.

Which, to me, means that those other systems are actually treating different pillars as being equal. If one pillar is a series of very formalized checks, and one pillar is vague, handwavey and mostly freeform, it's not unreasonable to say that the game is about the first pillar and not the second.

No, the choice is that they give people rules where we need rules. Same way they had detailed stealth rules and decided to go with general guidelines instead.

-------

Funny thing is, I was thinking about this thread and the psionics threads going on. Now, I am like @Oofta here about psionics. I do not want a full psionic system in the game that is separate from casting just like he doesn't want a social mechanics system. Fair enough. That's all personal preference. But, the difference is, I'd be fairly content if they brought out a completely separate psionic system. I'd treat it exactly like I have in every other edition - completely ignore it and not use it.

It baffles me why there is such resistance to adding a social mechanics module to D&D for those of us who would use it and those that want to keep the sort of standard D&D methods could keep doing that. I mean, if you like D&D's non-combat resolution mechanics, that means you're largely free-forming anyway. So, why would the existence of mechanics change anything for you?

Because I don't want people thinking in terms of mechanics. I want them engaging with the world around them in a way that is natural. Any system that is transparent (and any published system largely will be) to people doing math and calculations in their head, it becomes a balance of resource allocation and points not just talking to the guard. It becomes less flexible from the DM's standpoint as well. At least it does for me.

If you want a system, I'm sure there are plenty of unofficial options or options that can be borrowed from other games. I may pick up the Strixhaven module just to see what they did, but the systems I've seen or that people describe would take away a dynamic aspect of D&D for me that I enjoy as far as I can tell.

I [EDIT]could would[/EDIT] personally ignore it, but if people have mechanical resolutions some will latch onto it. Some players will demand it, some DMs will never feel competent to go outside of them. I think that it could easily be detrimental to the game overall. Being forced out of your comfort zone is sometimes the only way to learn how to do things differently.

EDIT: 5E is the best selling version of D&D ever. My concern is that people are arguing for a significant change to how the system works, even if the rules are optional. Such a drastic change should be approached with extreme caution.

 

[Aldarc]

If you can't figure out that I am speaking solely for my personal experiences and no one else's, then there is no point at all at discussing this matter further.

No, you are being disingenuous. You clearly stated that the alternative to mechanical resolution was:

I'll take that as a "no."

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Cookbook: "This cookbook will not tell you how to cook, or prepare, meals for dinner, but we will tell you that dinner is an important part of the set of daily meals -- you should absolutely have dinner! But we're not giving you any ideas about dinner, you're on your own. Hopefully, you've had dinner before and so have some basis for figuring it out, or someone else can teach you how to make dinner, or perhaps you can watch some videos online about dinner, but there will be no discussion of dinner here."

Fans: "That Cookbook is just the best for making dinner!"

I don't get it.

My partner is widely considered to be an excellent cook. People often ask her to write down her recipes. She can't, because here secret to being an excellent cook is she adjusts the ingredients to taste and doesn't stick to the recipe.

 

[Oofta]

My partner is widely considered to be an excellent cook. People often ask her to write down her recipes. She can't, because here secret to being an excellent cook is she adjusts the ingredients to taste and doesn't stick to the recipe.

I've hit that now and then. Made chili for friends once and had someone get upset when I couldn't tell them exactly how I made it. Apparently "add spices until it smelled right" wasn't the answer she was looking for.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Sorry, this post is to intellectual for me, I don't understand.

Let me try to help:

RPGs are about conflict and it's resolution. "Can my character convince the king to support our mission," is a conflict. The game is, for this moment, going to be about how this conflict resolves.

When we do this, we can do it in a bunch of ways. The way that D&D generally proposes is "ask your GM what happens." The GM can call for a die roll or just say. If they call for a roll, the GM sets the needed roll and also still says what happens after the roll. So, in this kind of play, the GM has all of the authority to say what happens and can use a number of ways to do it. The default assumption here is that the GM is honest, and has the good of the game in mind, so if this is so the GM is acting to best suit the game. This, however, requires a huge amount of trust in the GM to be this person and to have the skill to not make (many) mistakes of either resolution or understanding of what the player is trying to do. Let's assume that in general this is so -- the GM is competent and trustworthy.

But what if a mistake is made? What if the GM, in a moment of being a human, puts their thumb on the scale? What if the player misunderstand the GM's perfectly fine ruling as either of the above (another moment of being human)? This approach depends on trust, and trust is very, very easy to damage. Still, in general, people can usually trust their friends, and a good GM can earn trust and even repair it if something like this happens, and also we're often conditioned by life to deal with less than perfect trust relationships so, in general, this approach works well enough. However, there's always this specter of lost trust to this approach -- lose that trust and the whole thing crumbles. This is the exact thing that most of the RPG horror stories revolve around -- disregard, loss, or abuse of this trust between GM and players.

So, then, what do robust mechanics do to this? They remove quite a lot of that specter of lost trust. If there's an open, understood way to resolve RPG conflicts and the inputs are clear and the output space is also clear, then there's no where that trust can be lost because trust isn't in the system. This is that competitive integrity @Manbearcat is talking about -- it's a clear resolution system where any abuse it immediately obvious to all participants.

Now, to hopefully head it off, this is and isn't about trust. It's not a matter of one not trusting their GM so much as it is one of having a level playing field. I'm a GM for systems that don't have any kind of structure in place for social conflicts (5e) and for systems that have robust structures in place for social conflicts (Blades in the Dark, for one). I certainly don't like the social structures of Blades because I don't trust myself as a GM! What I've actually found is that I'm more free to bring heavy consequences and direct pressure under the Blades system because I do not ever have to worry about any of my actions damaging or calling into question trust.

Finally, I've used the term "conflict" throughout for a reason. It's not about "winning" but resolving conflict. If the players do not want conflicts resolved in favor of their characters, there's a larger discussion that needs to take place. Social mechanics are not about skipping to the "win" but about how you resolve the conflict. Often, robust mechanics are not at all single rolls, sometimes they're entire sessions. In Blades, one of the score types is "social" and that's a session's worth of play to resolve the question or ask that kicks it off. These results are quite often messy in the sense that they're not clean and easy for the characters but full of not quite what you wanted paired with unforeseen consequences. So any quick quip of "social mechanics are just button mashes to 'win'" is a category error.

 

[Manbearcat]

Sorry, this post is to intellectual for me, I don't understand.

Alright, since explaining things from concepts didn't work, I'll try the time-tested, utterly failure-proof route of explanation by way of analogy! What could go wrong!

I'm sure you've played some kind of sport in your life where there was a referee.

Let us say that instead of that referee (1) exclusively being tasked with mediating teams/players as the stuff they do in the game intersects with the codified rules, lets say they also have the following jobs:

(2) Ensure a satisfying dramatic arc occurs in the game.

(3) Reward players for good effort in their play (which, effectively, means penalizing the other team despite the merits of that teams play of the game/sport).

So the referee isn't just mediating participant: rules collisions, they're also rewarding effort and manufacturing a dramatic arc onto play (that is definitionally at the discretion of the referee).

As a result of wearing all three of these hats (which might be at cross-purposes in any given moment of play), the participants of this hypothetical sporting event can't know for sure if the referee was using (1), (2), or (3) as the reasoning for calling a penalty or ignoring a penalty in this particular moment of play vs the next moment of play (and the moment of play after that and on and on).

Inevitably, this will lead to the players crying foul or at least thinking about crying foul.

It will also lead to the referee being in a position where they're juggling a lot of different (and often divergent) interests simultaneously...at their discretion.

Timmy worked really hard here so I'm not giving Jill the benefit of the call she should rightly get under other circumstances.

Man, this game is getting out of hand. Team x is up by 20? Lets start calling a bunch of fouls on Team x and get this game back within single digits.

Holy cow, what a play! And it was at the buzzer. But the player who made the play actually committed a foul so it shouldn't count...but man, what drama! I'm going to let it stand because it was just too incredible a climax.

The other thing it will lead to is a propensity for the referee to rarely (not never, but rarely) be surprised by play outcomes because, with so many responsibilities and such a disproportionately potent signature on play outcomes, their hands are overwhelmingly the one moving the planchette (oh, a Ouija analogy...an analogy within an anology...this is surely to go well!).

---

I'm sure this sucks much more than my other post and its "I disagree with the premise" and analogy picking apart time, but that is the best I got. If that doesn't do any work in explaining my position, then I'm tapping out talking to you and scruffy nerf herder about this thing I'm trying to communicate. I'll take my word salad with a side of "I'm a douche for the way I write" elsewhere.

 

[Ovinomancer]

My partner is widely considered to be an excellent cook. People often ask her to write down her recipes. She can't, because here secret to being an excellent cook is she adjusts the ingredients to taste and doesn't stick to the recipe.

Perfect! My wife is also an excellent cook, but can actually write down her recipes. What's you're point? Are you claiming that all really good chefs don't follow or are incapable of creating recipes?