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

 

[Lylandra]

First off a shout out to @Aldarc for the link to Rob Donoghue's tweets. very informative. The solution to making travel interesting could be in there. I would love to see skill challenges reworked with those ideas.


@UngeheuerLich I agree with your analysis above and it lead to the acceptance of unreasonable high DC for common tasks and to gatekeeping things behind dice rolls, for which there was often no need. Use Rope, I am looking at you.

Yep, my pet peeve with D&D is that (depending on edition ofc) you can get really creative in terms of combat and be rewarded for being prepared, using clever tactics etc. On top of combat having good dynamics and being statistically more even by requiring multiple die rolls.
And that all of this is strongly supported by the rules.

But as soon as you're trying to persuade someone with a good tale, you better have trained persuasion + high cha or a really good die roll or else you'll probably fail instantly in a single roll. Which is not really dynamic or interesting. Unless you have a DM who can handle skill rolls in an engaging way.

 

[Lyxen]

I do feel 5e does/can support more pillars other than combat. I don't know that it's that apparent to people. I think that using milestone for levelling is a step in the right direction because it shows you can set a goal (defeat Lord Badbreath the dragon) and have that as your objective endpoint for a level. Of course, your mileage may vary

And we did play without experience even in 1e, it was not called milestones, it was just "follow the story". It's not a new thing in the game, it's just been properly formalised in 5e and it's a good thing.

 

[Lyxen]

@UngeheuerLich I agree with your analysis above and it lead to the acceptance of unreasonable high DC for common tasks and to gatekeeping things behind dice rolls, for which there was often no need. Use Rope, I am looking at you.

I think this was the remains of classes being very specialised, and the game requiring a diverse party to function, compared to the fact that a healer was needed. 5e cut back a lot on this, you certainly can have parties with no healers and actually roles are way less strong.

So, I agree with the above, but there is also an interesting 5e section called the role of dice, in which success can be granted when characters do something logical in the game world rather than relying on pure technical elements.

 

[Lyxen]

But as soon as you're trying to persuade someone with a good tale, you better have trained persuasion + high cha or a really good die roll or else you'll probably fail instantly in a single roll. Which is not really dynamic or interesting. Unless you have a DM who can handle skill rolls in an engaging way.

Have a look at "The Role of Dice" in the 5e DMG and in particular "Ignoring the dice". We play mostly that way, reserving the dice rolls for when there is something to be gained by being more random.

 

[S'mon]

My 4e D&D often felt 90% combat, my 5e is closer to 50-50 I think, but leaning more than less.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

Based on my groups

Time taken up in a session - 40% Combat 30% Exploration 30% Roleplay
Rules in the game - 70% Combat 20% Exploration 10% Roleplay

I wonder if the roleplaying rules in the books being so short is because there are a few design assumptions: 1) They use the 'cops and robbers' pretend analogy edition after edition, I think with the assumption that that's roleplaying, 2) Because of that use of that analogy, or the assumption that people learning D&D won't be being taught by first-timers and learning together, they make an assumption that new players will learn to roleplay by interacting with an experienced GM and experienced table.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

How much an individual D&D game is about combat is down to the individual table, DMs, and players. Roleplay doesn't really require a lot of mechanics, so D&D can replicate a huge range of playstyles.

But mechanically I think it still favors combat (not surprising, for a game derived from wargames). Combat resolution takes up a fair amount of rules space and mechanical elements for spells, magic items, character abilities, etc are largely required to address combat usage. It's less in 5E than 4E, but still pretty strong.

Plus many of the character distinguishing features and abilities come out in combat -- so in a combat-lite D&D game players have a lot on their sheets they won't use. Players will want to use the things they're given, so I think that naturally tends to gravitate D&D toward more combat-heavy game time.

It's certainly possible for rules systems to be built differently. I just got my Free League The One Ring starter set & core rule book, and reading over it (which is largely the same as the prior Cubicle 7 TOR system) it struck me how not-combat-focused TOR is. You could easily run an entire Shire-based campaign and never use the combat mechanics. Sure, 5E can do it too -- Adventures in Middle Earth by C7 used the 5E engine to do the same IP, but IMO TOR did it better.

Potentially unpopular opinion -- I think older D&D versions ( BX D&D and its OSR clones) might be better choices for combat-lite games. Fewer combat mechanics on a character sheet make fewer demands on "I have this cool ability I never use" for players.

But of course in the end this is down to individual DM and player preference and taste.

 

[BrokenTwin]

No, actually, it's not a D&D thing. As soon as the system is a least slightly more technical than narrative, that focus exist. Look at Runequest, Shadowrun, Rolemaster and derivations, etc. Even CoC has quite a bit of combat rules amongst the rules part.



3e and 4e only required grids, and that made these editions more boardgamy and combat-centric, but it's not the majority of editions.



And in many, many systems out there, again, it's not a pure D&D thing.

I didn't say D&D was the only system that has a mechanical focus on combat, I meant that for people who have played systems where combat has the same level of abstraction as other areas, the focus that D&D has on combat feels incredibly obvious. And as the 800lb gorilla that had most systems following it various forms of fantasy heartbreakers, calling that take D&D-centric certainly feels appropriate.

Call of Cthulu may have detailed rules for combat, but it's quite possible to make a character who starts terrible at combat and NEVER gets better, despite improving in other areas. And the system strongly implies through its words and mechanics that engaging in combat is a failure-state.

 

[Lyxen]

My 4e D&D often felt 90% combat, my 5e is closer to 50-50 I think, but leaning more than less.

I'm not surprised, some people are in denial about the way the system design influences the game, but I've had similar experiences and it's one of the reasons we continued to play Pathfinder in parallel with 4e and dropped both as soon as 5e came out so that we could get ou AD&D feelings back in place.

 

[Scott Christian]

I guess the question is what percentage of combat is MtG?