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

 

[Greg K]

Winneger is being sarcastic, but maybe he is "designing it wrong," if he is aiming for the game to have mechanical support for things outside combat ("exploration," "social," however you define it). For example, if you play 5e theater of the mind, you invariably come across situations in the rules that depend on 5' units of space. Or, all the focus on class features that make use of your bonus action or reaction--things that only have relevance in combat.

When I read what he wrote, I thought he is not playing it wrong, but he (and the rest of the team) might be designing it wrong.

 

[jgsugden]

I've played in games with 95% combat, and games that were 10% combat. How much combat is there in your game? That is 75% up to the DM, and 25% up to the players.

 

[pukunui]

The session I ran last night was 0% combat.

 

[Charlaquin]

50% Doritos and Mountain Dew, 30% pop culture references, 15% rules bickering, 20% exploration, 90% combat.

And 100% reason to remember the name!

…wait

 

[Cruentus]

I've run some games where the combat is minimal, and the players look around, and want to use all the cool abilities and powers on their sheets - which are all about combat. There is certainly a bias in the rules/skills/adventures that skew toward combat. Sure, you can talk your way out of/around encounters, but that's less for fighting Tiamat, and more for Strixhaven (arguably built to be able to have low to zero combat).

I enjoy non-combat games, where the combat has some real danger and ramps up the tension. But mostly its combat after combat, little to no actual threat, and some rolls against skill to "do stuff", so they can get back to fighting stuff.

 

[TrippyHippy]

Game rules don’t dictate play. GMs and players do.

Doctor Who’s Initiative system might be adopted to the 5E game and that will create the same sort of emphasis for non-combatitive play, I think. You can take the violent route, but you’ll be at a disadvantage - people can then work out what they want to do based on that.

I think there complicated aspects of adaptation will be trying to shoe-horn in things like Classes and Levels (with escalating HP), assuming they use them.

 

[Morrus]

Game rules don’t dictate play.

Doctor Who’s Initiative system might be adopted to the 5E game and that will create the same sort of emphasis for non-combatitive play, I think.

These two sentences directly contradict each other.

 

[Malmuria]

I suppose we can ask, where does the sentiment "90% combat" come from, if it's not an accurate reflection of time spend in gameplay? Consider the design of an ability from Tasha's. This is from the "animating performance" feature of bard college of creation:

ANIMATING PERFORMANCE

6th-level College ofCreation feature

As an action, you can target a Large or smaller non magical item you can see within 30 feet of you and animate it. The animate item uses the Dancing Item stat block, which uses your proficiency bonus (PB). The item is friendly to you and your companions and obeys your commands. It lives for 1 hour, until it is reduced to 0 hit points, or until you die.

In combat, the item shares your initiative count, but it takes its turn immediately after yours. It can move and use its reaction on its own, but the only action it takes on its turn is the Dodge action, unless you take a bonus action on your turn to command it to take another action. That action can be one in its stat block or some other action. If you are incapaci tated, the item can take any action of its choice, not just Dodge.

The fiction of this ability is contained in the first line of the description: play your flute and do some fantasia stuff. Everything else, including the entire stat block included for this one feature, has to do with combat. Because a 6th level ability would be considered "underpowered" if it didn't have a clear, spelled out use for combat. It has to be balanced around other 6th level abilities and the Bard's overall effectiveness in combat. And if you didn't include the detail as to how many times it could be used, or how powerful the animated item was in combat, either the DM would have to make it up or the feature would be "overpowered." It suggests to me that overall combat effectiveness always has to be considered by the designers whenever they write up a new feature.

Now a player can use this feature to animate a pumpkin head to scare a guard or something, so it's not necessarily a combat ability. But given that it's a 1/LR feature, and that it has all of this text related to combat, I'm guessing most players will save it for doing something violent.

 

[Kinematics]

Hmm. Last 3 D&D sessions were one long fight with a dragon.

To be fair, this is based on an adventure module, which will have a strong influence on how much of the adventure is about combat. Plus, we're coming up on the end of the module, which means we're running into a lot of big fights to resolve storylines.

With adventure modules, I see a lot of: Stealth check, Perception check, Stealth check, Perception check, COMBAT! With homebrew adventures, I see a lot more interaction with NPCs and puzzle solving. Probably because puzzle solving needs a lot more fine-tuning with respect to how the players engage with the story, so is a lot harder to fit into a mostly fixed published adventure. Combat, on the other hand, is much more 'static' of a feature, and thus is an easier obstacle to put together.

Plus, as mentioned, there's very little in the rules that isn't combat or combat-adjacent.

 

[Rune]

The last session I ran was 100% resolution of downtime actions. The next one or two probably will be, too. That’s not the norm, though. Most of the games I run involve actual adventuring, combat included. But I run theater of the mind and most of my combats are quickly-handled skirmishes, because I believe that is important to the flow of the campaign.

I think the impression that D&D might be 90% combat might be rooted less in the rules and more in the published adventures, though. They tend to put a lot of emphasis on that pillar. I play in a game where the DM does not do theater of the mind, the book is rarely deviated from (other than a homebrew magic item here or there), and tactics are a high priority.

The actual content of the adventure may not be 90% combat, but the time spent at the table very easily could be. Moreso when we’re doing it online, since that actually slows things down quite a bit.