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]

Haven't we been talking about the design of the game, and not individual tables, for a while now?

Y'all keep saying we have to focus on your viewpoint because if we look at how people actually use those rules it starts to fall apart.

It makes no sense to look at source material without looking at implementation. Amount of text, the number of rules have little correspondence to importance.

How can we discuss what is important to a game without discussing the actual game?

 

[Hussar]

@doctorbadwolf - I have to ask. You have a really entertaining thread, about 50 pages long now, of people detailing their last session. At least half of the stories, the session is either all or mostly combat. The number of completely non combat threads is few.

Doesn’t it somewhat indicate that DnD tends to be pretty combat heavy?

————-
@Oofta

The reason we can’t really talk about personal campaigns is because that’s a moving target. It’s simply dueling anecdotes. I mean I’ve been flat out told that my experiences don’t matter and my experiences are so far an outlier that they can be ignored.

The irony gets to be a bit much.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But, isn't that a bit of a contradiction? You first say that 5e "could really have spread out somehow.." but then claim that the problem is in advice. So, you accept that there are mechanical issues but then roll back and say that it's simply an issue of advice?

No, it isn’t a contradiction, because I’m not identifying a problem. See, just because I would prefer something be a little different, or could stand to be expanded upon, doesn’t mean it’s a problem.

The advice, on the other hand, is a problem.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yet, for all of that, @doctorbadwolf, anytime we do try to point to what D&D is about, it's not that either. So, I'm rather at a loss here. It's not about non-combat stuff, but, at the same time, it's not about combat stuff either.

Show me anyone claiming both that D&D is primarily about combat and primarily about non combat stuff.

The hyperbolic posturing that happens in these discussions just makes it harder to take the arguments that accompany it seriously.

5e is about roleplaying heroic adventure, and as such is about all three pillars. It’s not a difficult position to understand, is it?

 

[Maxperson]

But that right there is the kind of competing priorities that are being talked about. Legit challenge versus fun is a primary example. Yes, hopefully you do both, but sometimes these two priorities may be at odds.

Character death is a pretty obvious example. Let's say things have taken a turn and it looks like one of the PCs is going to die. The player is particularly attached to the PC.... having the PC die probably won't be considered fun for that player. Do you as GM somehow dial back the threat? Do you softball things to give the character a shot at making it through? Or do you honor the competitive integrity of the game and let the dice fall where they may?

I don't see any of those as competing priorities.

My players find challenges fun, moderate encounters fun, and face stomping weak things one in a while to be fun. It's not a choice between, do I give them something fun or do I give them something to face stomp.

It's the same for death. I have set procedures for when I will and will not fudge dice for the players. I will fudge them only if A) they didn't make any bad decisions that led to the encounter or their position in the encounter, and B) the dice gods have taken a disliking to them and they're rolling 1s, 2s and 3s while I'm rolling 20s against them. I'm not going to kill a PC or TPK the group over extreme bad luck. Even then I will only fudge a bit to even up the odds. They could still die or TPK, but they will have a fighting chance. Coming back from the dead is rare in my game, so it's important for me not to let super bad luck be the cause of the loss of a PC.

Those procedures are set, though, so there's no competing priority there.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The game is not a competition.

This. 1000% this.
@Manbearcat Your entire argument is based on treating D&D as a competition. It seems to me that a majority of people on both sides of the argument reject this idea.

I might just mention that, as a classic nerd, I absolutely loathe competitive sport (I thought I had made that clear already), so even without the basic invalid assumption trying to use a sports-based argument is going to fail with me!

 

[Mordhau]

I tend to feel in these discussions that they seem to break down into people who ask the question "Is D&D the best tool for the job for the game I'm running" and those that seem to feel that it alway is.

 

[Hussar]

Show me anyone claiming both that D&D is primarily about combat and primarily about non combat stuff.

The hyperbolic posturing that happens in these discussions just makes it harder to take the arguments that accompany it seriously.

5e is about roleplaying heroic adventure, and as such is about all three pillars. It’s not a difficult position to understand, is it?

Except that one pillar takes up a significantly larger portion of play time, rules time and mental space in the game.

But, hey, we're just going around in circles here. I'll be unsubscribing now, so, feel free to have the last word.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I tend to feel in these discussions that they seem to break down into people who ask the question "Is D&D the best tool for the job for the game I'm running" and those that seem to feel that it alway is.

Not really. I have played a number of game systems over the years (Traveller, CoC, FASA Star Trek, Golden Heroes, Star Wars D6) but I have always preferred a freeform (i.e. D&D style) approach to social situations. D&D isn't the only game that does it that way! My games are always quite social, but I don't feel I need tools or rules for that.

But other things other games do better. FASA Trek had awesome starship combat, but 5e's ship combat rules suck bigtime!

 

[Mordhau]

Except that one pillar takes up a significantly larger portion of play time, rules time and mental space in the game.

But, hey, we're just going around in circles here. I'll be unsubscribing now, so, feel free to have the last word.

Honestly, I find the whole three pillars thing is just frustrating.

I simply don't feel that any kind of satisfactory bar was met to ever take the idea of three pillars at all seriously.

It feels like something almost entirely willed into existence on the basis that people like the sound of it and just really want it to be meaningfully true.