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

 

[Eric V]

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.

Yeah, the three pillars were definitely not given the same level of design...I hope they weren't meant to all hold up the same ceiling.

 

[Eric V]

On another thread that discussed the pillars, I had a similar issue. I'm not sure if "pillars" are the best way to conceptualize its respective game aspects. Other games use ideas like "phases," which are often oriented around time or in-game focus. I think that I may have preferred something akin to Encounters, Journeys, and Downtime. Possibly with Encounters broken up into either Combat and Non-Combat Encounters.

Worth mentioning that 5e has space for such design...AiME has something similar to what you describe.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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

For you, sure. Not sure about “rules time”, but I’ve never denied your personal experience.

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

Okay.

 

[Oofta]

@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?

If I were to recap a session where half the time was spent on shopping and investigation, I'd probably summarize it as "The group did some shopping and then tracked down the clues which led to [fight scene]." The fight scene would then take up the majority of the post even though time spent in session was 50/50.

————-
@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.

I'm sure there's a spectrum. Some tables probably do 10% combat, others do 90%. It seems to keep getting lost so I'll repeat: the amount of time in game spent on combat varies depending on the group. Is that clear enough? But that's not what people are arguing. They're saying that it's 90% combat. Period. According to this thread (which of course is not necessarily representative of the general public) only about 8% of respondents feel it's above 80%, which is about the same percentage that feel that it's 30% or less. Most are in that in-between area.

The game is what you make it. The game text itself is about evenly split between combat specific stuff and non combat text as far as I can tell, depending on how you define combat specific. You could say that teleport is a combat specific spell for example, I would not. If you play Strixhaven, you can apparently get to 10th level with no combat. Do I expect that to happen often? Of course not. I just reject the idea that we can't talk about the game without talking about how it's implemented. That competitive integrity has little or nothing to do with D&D.

Is combat important in most games? Yes. Is it the focus of the game, the only thing that is important, the only climax to the stories? Not for everyone, the rules are fairly neutral on what type of campaign you run.

 

[Oofta]

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.

I personally prefer limited rules outside of combat, even though out-of-combat stuff is as or more important than combat. That makes the non-combat stuff quite meaningful to me and my group. You want a different game. That doesn't make my experiences imaginary.

 

[Oofta]

Keep in mind that one reason why other people - the "y'all" in question - are emphasizing and re-emphasizing design rather than what individual tables do is because the tweets in question that frame this entire debate. It's framed in terms of "90% combat rules." The head of D&D and another staff member likewise both respond in terms of design as well.

The tweet didn't say that.

Woke up this morning to Twitter assuring me that @Wizards_DnD is "ninety percent combat." I must be playing (and designing) it wrong.​

The rest has already addressed many times.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.

5e D&D is the best tool for when I am going to just put heroes into a fantasy world and let them do what they want, because I can add heist dynamics to how I run the game, and nothing breaks. I can run a game in fantasy space and change nothing, with the only added stuff being “what skills and tools correspond to what jobs on a ship” type stuff, and nothing breaks. I can change how the game runs from adventure to adventure, sometimes even just for one part of an adventure, and nothing breaks.

If I want to do a fantasy heist campaign, BiTD works great, though it has some dynamics I don’t really dig that much. Thing is, I’m just not likely to do that, because no one in my group is really into running or playing games like that unless they’re pretty short.

Even when we play Star Wars, we don’t play hyper specific story-type campaigns, we include several story types in a given campaign.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.

It’s right there in the books.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So let me try something different. Let us try the effects of division of labor in your standard workplace.

You know how the structure of a work environment fails when one person has too much placed upon them while another has too little (yet their compensation is roughly the same)?

That sounds like an average workplace to me. It doesn't fail because the person doing most of the work also has most of the competence.

You know how this in turn undermines both the chemistry of the workplace and incentive structures toward individual hard work + pursuit of excellence and collective hard work + pursuit of excellence?

I though work was pursuit of a pay packet + going home as early as possible.

But D&D isn't work, it's leisure. People do it for fun, not because they have to. Participants are free to contribute as much or little as they like, and if at any point they are not having fun they can drop out.

I think you haven't grasped the point of an analogy - there has to be some level of similarity for it to work. D&D isn't like sport - if it was I wouldn't take part - I hate sport. D&D isn't like like work, I don't like that much either. I guess it's like Ouija, in that they are both games and both published by Hasbro. However, my only experience of it was running The House of Lament from VGR, when I made it spell out the messages the spirits wanted to convey. I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean.

 

[Oofta]

I don't think that it requires treating D&D as a competition. I think that the fundamental issue is about playing the game with integrity. There is, IMHO, a similar concern for "competitive integrity" when we hear the oft floated point from DMs about their players "meta-gaming" or "cheating."

I don't see anyone stating that the DM should [edit] not have integrity and run the game fairly. But what does that mean? That's what I've been arguing. We're not playing a board game. If the DM makes decisions that are not controlled by the entire group, they can always tip things in their favor if they want.

Nobody ever seems to address that though or how more detailed rules would fix a perceived problem. There will always be bad DMs, you can't constrain them to the point of nonexistence.