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

 

[Parmandur]

How much?

How much XP? Give me an EXACT number, supported by the system. Because I can tell you exactly how much an orc is worth.

"As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in Chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure." (DMG, p. 261)

So, depends on the lock, and the circumstances, but the system provides the principles to make quick and effective decisions like that.

 

[Parmandur]

No, it really, really doesn't. And, as I said, it's been clearly shown that other systems DO.

But, this is getting too circular for me. We're obviously not going to agree on this. The fact that you think that I somehow "stretched out" the combat pretty much shows that we're not going to agree on anything. Maybe you never have combats that last an hour? I would love to know how you can resolve them so quickly, but, hey, more power to you.

To me, if I didn't like combat, why on earth would I play D&D?

I mean, if I was that into combat, I wouldn't play D&D, I'd bust out the D&D Adventure board game. It gets more to that point, if desired.

Sure, it would be possible to do that combat faster than an hour, that should be a Medium difficulty combat. But I assume you and your players were having fun, hence "stretching it out" in play. Nothing wrong with that, but it could be done faster, by the book. In my experience, it almost always is.

 

[jmartkdr2]

That makes sense, though it feels like a result of safeguards being baked in to mitigate adversarial GMing.

My gut tells me this is intentional - bad dms ruin the fun for a lot of people.

And the vast majority of deaths I've experienced in D&D-style games haven't been from a gradual failure of rolls, but unexpected critical hits from monsters causing outlier levels of damage inside a single turn. But I think I understand where the idea comes from better now.

Even those crit-based sudden deaths are happening because the dice said so, not just dm fiat (unless the dm is known to fudge dice). Which is technically fair if not really fun. You knew it could happen.

Note that this doesn't fully explain why the combat rules are as in-depth as they are, just why they're more in-depth than most if not all other subsystems. I think DnD's appeal is partly in having a fun combat minigame, which is much more than a minimum viable combat system (even if a minimum-viable combat system is necessarily more complex than a minimum-viable 'talking to npcs' system)

 

[CleverNickName]

5E, as written, provides the framework for the question to be answered at the table without prefab "rules." Rulings, not rules. That not a lack of focus, it is freedom.

I think this is the greatest strength of the 5th Edition rules. Earlier editions already tried the "a rule for everything" approach, and it ended up being far too cumbersome for me and my friends. The density of the rules was why we dropped 3.X/Pathfinder.

 

[Parmandur]

I think this is the greatest strength of the 5th Edition rules. Earlier editions already tried the "a rule for everything" approach, and it ended up being far too cumbersome for me and my friends. The density of the rules was why we dropped 3.X/Pathfinder.

I mean, at a certain point it just breaks down.

 

[Parmandur]

My gut tells me this is intentional - bad dms ruin the fun for a lot of people.


Even those crit-based sudden deaths are happening because the dice said so, not just dm fiat (unless the dm is known to fudge dice). Which is technically fair if not really fun. You knew it could happen.

Note that this doesn't fully explain why the combat rules are as in-depth as they are, just why they're more in-depth than most if not all other subsystems. I think DnD's appeal is partly in having a fun combat minigame, which is much more than a minimum viable combat system (even if a minimum-viable combat system is necessarily more complex than a minimum-viable 'talking to npcs' system)

It is a fun part of the game, don't get me wrong. But I think you hit the nail on the head, combat needs to be specific because lives are on the line.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think this is the greatest strength of the 5th Edition rules. Earlier editions already tried the "a rule for everything" approach, and it ended up being far too cumbersome for me and my friends. The density of the rules was why we dropped 3.X/Pathfinder.

Density of rules is more a function of what purpose the rules are serving rather than what things the game cares about. Even in 3.x editions, D&D didn't really care about a lot of things. There weren't systems for those things. You could ask the question about gathering new flock with preaching and those systems didn't have an answer, either.

No, rules density is more about how you want the system to manage things rather than what it manages. By this, I mean things like simulation vs emulation. High density systems tend to have a focus on trying to simulate play in the system. Lower density systems tend to forgo simulation in favor of emulation -- I don't have to model every cut and thrust in a knife fight, asking stances, and feints, and counterfeints (high sim) when I could just have a simple mechanic that emulates a genre trope and this can work as well. 5e sits in between (like most games) but is slightly more towards simulation (it focuses on how you do individual tasks at a pretty high resolution). Pathfinder was much more down the simulation tree, but not nearly as far as you can go. Meanwhile, FATE is very much a genre emulator. Blades is much more emulation than simulation (it deals with things at a dramatic level). Typically, the more dense a system is, the more it's trying to simulate rather than emulate.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think this is the greatest strength of the 5th Edition rules. Earlier editions already tried the "a rule for everything" approach, and it ended up being far too cumbersome for me and my friends. The density of the rules was why we dropped 3.X/Pathfinder.

Sorry for the separate post, but it occurred to me that 5e is being lauded here for what it doesn't do at all but instead makes the players figure out, and that seems amusing.

 

[Cruentus]

I mean, if I was that into combat, I wouldn't play D&D, I'd bust out the D&D Adventure board game. It gets more to that point, if desired.

Sure, it would be possible to do that combat faster than an hour, that should be a Medium difficulty combat. But I assume you and your players were having fun, hence "stretching it out" in play. Nothing wrong with that, but it could be done faster, by the book. In my experience, it almost always is.

Nope. I've had the same experience as @Hussar. Combats with 4-6 PCs, their bags of HP and action economy - I move, take my action, a bonus action, and maybe a reaction, for every PC, then the sack o hit points monsters, which I can't just have 1 or 2 cause they get wacked by the PC action economy, so I need grunts to soak up some of those resources, next thing I know, we're also an hour into it.

Heck, I was playing in a game where one guy WALKED HIS DOG during combat, not let it out, but took it for a walk, and came back before it was his turn again.

It certainly CAN be 1-2 rounds, if you're not really challenging anyone, or if you're TPKing a party, but that's a super fine line IME. So yeah, we've had quick combats, but its certainly not the norm.

AGAIN, your mileage may vary. (and we've all been playing together for more than 40 years, so we know the games, know how to play the characters, no analysis paralysis, and its virtual, so the "dragging it out" or socialization ain't what's slowing things down, nor is the virtual environment, cause that's all point and click, no one even needs to calculate anything).

 

[Parmandur]

Nope. I've had the same experience as @Hussar. Combats with 4-6 PCs, their bags of HP and action economy - I move, take my action, a bonus action, and maybe a reaction, for every PC, then the sack o hit points monsters, which I can't just have 1 or 2 cause they get wacked by the PC action economy, so I need grunts to soak up some of those resources, next thing I know, we're also an hour into it.

Well, there you go: you can have just one or two, because they are meant to be wacked by the PC action economy by design. I would call that stretching it out, just going by the rules as written. If you want a long combat, as you seem to, you can: but that is dragging it out. The usual idea isn't for a single encounter to be an obstacle that takes a long time, but a string of quick and dirty encounters will wear down a party.