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...

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[jayoungr]

It isn't, in my experience, but there's this strong perception that it is.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Haven't had a combat in a couple of sessions.

On the other hand, they've got a bit of a point that D&D's chassis might not be the best RPG rules for Doctor Who...

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I wouldn't be shocked if a literal 90% of the verbiage of the rules is devoted to things related to combat, but if you look at a real world legal code it does not line up in percentage of words to how citizens spend their lives. Radically more words are spent on crimes most people will never even consider committing than on, say, the act of sleeping that people devote a third of their lives to.

I would also argue that even for people going out of their way to treat it as a combat game, "90%" is hyperbolic.

While I do think 5e is a terrible fit for Doctor Who from a game design purist standpoint, the simple fact is that it's a lot easier to get a 5e-derived game together than anything else. If you have an established tabletop group that is always happy to learn a whole new system and are Doctor Who fans, this isn't for you. If you are looking to create the highest Venn diagram overlap of potential people in the world interested in the show and willing to learn the rules it suddenly makes a lot of sense.

 

[Dausuul]

Gameplay is not 90% combat; but the rules are overwhelmingly focused on combat. There is very little mechanical support for anything else--just a quick-and-dirty skill system that has to bear the weight of resolving everything that isn't fighting, plus a smattering of spells that let you point at a noncombat challenge and make it vanish.

People can and do run low-combat or no-combat D&D, and more power to them. But doing that is like buying a car because you need a place to keep your stuff. A car can certainly function as a storage unit, but you're paying for a whole lot of functionality you're not going to use.

 

[Shiroiken]

The space of written game mechanics do focus far more on combat than the other two pillars, which is a shame. However, actual play varies based on group and campaign. A campaign could be 100% combat or 0% combat, but most are in between. I feel the published adventures are about 50-70% combat though, which will also skew public perception of the game. Most of my campaigns are probably about 40% combat, 40% exploration, and 20% social.

 

[Aldarc]

While one can, and most certainly will, quibble about the exact percentages, it does seem pretty clear that not every pillar in the game shares equal mechanical support in D&D. The degree to which a table chooses to engage with what mechanical support is there (or not) for their own games is a distinctly separate matter.

 

[NaturalZero]

The game mechanics in the books, mostly yes.

The game as people actually play it at the table, mostly no.

This pretty much nails it, right in the first response.

The rules for any particular non-combat activity are a single roll, yet when it comes to combat you have hit points, armor class, different dice for a range of deadly weapons, a good chunk of the game's spells, hit dice, critical hits, etc., etc. You certainly can play non-combat DnD, and I've recently run a game with where we almost got through 3 sessions before I had in inject a combat into the campaign, but the rules are undoubtedly combat-oriented compared to other systems out there.

I saw that they were making a DnD Doctor Who and was struck by how poor of a fit it is. You CAN smash a Doctor Who shaped peg into a DnD shaped hole but I'm sure there are dozens of other systems out there that would work much more naturally.

 

[Retreater]

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

 

[Oofta]

It's closer to 87.7% combat.

So let's round that number a little bit and call it 39%, okay? Good.

 

[Morrus]

I saw that they were making a DnD Doctor Who and was struck by how poor of a fit it is. You CAN smash a Doctor Who shaped peg into a DnD shaped hole but I'm sure there are dozens of other systems out there that would work much more naturally.

They’ve made a Doctor Who RPG for over a decade with its own system. The 5E version doesn’t take away from that game. People can choose! But let’s not rehash that here; they’re getting a lot of toxic blowback on Twitter over that.