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

 

[hawkeyefan]

You could just do smaller milestones and require more of them. One encounter (which can be in either pillar) = one tick. Particular plot point = an arbitrary number of ticks. Ten ticks = level up. Or something like that.

It should however be noted that the 5e XP table in particular has some sophistication built into it that's easily missed. Notably, level 1 to 2 takes almost no XP at all, and level 2 to 3 is pretty fast as well. That's because those are essentially tutorial levels. It also acts as a subtle multi-class penalty, because after all you're paying thousands of XP for a benefit that normally costs like 300 XP.

After that things settle down a bit, but things speed up significantly in tier 3 when things go from about 15 medium encounters per level to about 10. I reckon this is because traditionally the "sweet spot" is level 5-10, and the XP table is designed to keep you there longer. Also, I think there's an element of "a high-level fight is more complex so it takes longer so you shouldn't need as many of them to level up". This is unlike 3e and IIRC 4e where the XP requirements and rewards were designed around a constant number of equal-level encounters per level.

Of course, one may or may not care about this, but it's always good to analyze a system before you mess around with it. A good starting point would be to divide the XP difference per level with the number of XP for a particular level in the encounter building guidelines.

Yeah, see all that is, to me, juice that's not worth the squeeze.

I want some player facing stuff that's not simply tied to monsters defeated or even challenges faced. Maybe something related to BIFTs or other character related elements. Probably some based on class, as well. Just small achievable goals that they can complete each session, and get a point for it. Something like that. Keep the numbers manageable, vary up the tasks, make it all easy to track and observe.... that's what I'd like to see.

For some people, milestone leveling feels like "Good boy, here's a cookie" – particularly if it's tied to particular plot developments ("kill the boss, level up"). Traditional XP can feel more objective, in that it rewards the PCs for doing whatever instead of for following the DM's plot. That can of course be fixed, at least somewhat, by using a "lesser milestone" system similar to the one above where it's still "do stuff, get tick, get enough ticks, level up."

I think this somewhat relates to the distinction between sandboxes and railroads. On a railroad, it's easy to give a level at each stop, but it also diminishes the players' agency. In a sandbox, everything is up to the PCs, so there aren't obvious things to tie milestones to.

Milestone leveling can feel arbitrary. I say that despite doing it for decades.

 

[Ovinomancer]

For me its important because I have a better understanding if I have a player who is bummed out by no mechanical XP chart. I get an understanding of what they are looking for. So, I can either explain my GM style, adjust my playstyle, or go our own ways. The two are not the same thing even though they may be related to one another.

I don't hate mechanics that drive RP, if fact I prefer them to straight up encounter pass systems. I still prefer a more organic approach that doesn't tie any mechanics to RP. It just feels inauthentic to me at the table. Though, I totally understand that some players need to be lead to the mt dew so they can drink. If it gets players out of the shell, im all for it.

So, to put a not fine point on it, you're still engaging these things with mechanics. You've tied getting levels to roleplaying as surely as Traumas do it in Blades. To get levels, I need to follow your hooks, and the expectation at your table is that freeform roleplaying will be needed to get the GM to move along the scene. I need to engage NPCs in this roleplaying to move along. You've swapped in your fiat choice as GM as to if roleplaying happened sufficiently well for a less arbitrary system like a check or die roll.

Nothing at all wrong with this -- it seems many enjoy this mode of play, and, frankly, this is largely how I run 5e (there really aren't other alternatives), too. But I do like to call spades spades, and GM Says is very much a game mechanic.

 

[payn]

So, to put a not fine point on it, you're still engaging these things with mechanics. You've tied getting levels to roleplaying as surely as Traumas do it in Blades. To get levels, I need to follow your hooks, and the expectation at your table is that freeform roleplaying will be needed to get the GM to move along the scene. I need to engage NPCs in this roleplaying to move along. You've swapped in your fiat choice as GM as to if roleplaying happened sufficiently well for a less arbitrary system like a check or die roll.

Nothing at all wrong with this -- it seems many enjoy this mode of play, and, frankly, this is largely how I run 5e (there really aren't other alternatives), too. But I do like to call spades spades, and GM Says is very much a game mechanic.

Perhaps, but there is distinction. In my game you can explore character, setting, story in any way you see fit. Traumas in Blades are specific, like XP awards in traditional play. Knowing specifics locks in specific types of play. That's what I want to avoid no matter how good you are at following the specifics, its still always and only the specifics.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Indeed, D&D would be an odd RPG choice (considering what's out there) if one didn't like combat.

Sure, and I think the thread has lost track of something important, over time. Saying "No, DnD is not primarily about combat", does not mean that combat isn't important or prominent in DnD. It just means that it isn't overwhelmingly predominant.

I don't disagree. The problem I had with it was that as written it was too inflexible. Too often our challenges devolved into "Okay Mike did X, Carol did Y, who has the best score in Z?" It replaced role playing with roll playing in too many cases. It often didn't matter what you said, did or had done before the skill challenge started, it all came down to the roll of a dice. Why bother with having a conversation with the merchant when you know all that will matter is that someone has to succeed on 6 checks (i.e. bluff, diplomacy, insight and so on) before 3 failures? A description of skill challenges for those not familiar can be found here.

I think the core concept potentially had merit in some cases. I still use a similar structure for some physical/exploration challenges as a change of pace occasionally. I think that's a separate thread topic though.

Like several other ideas, skill challenges are an idea that work better in 5e than in the edition in which it was introduced. applying 5e design logic, using the more loosely defined skills, using advantage and disadvantage, etc. And the game uses the structure in downtime activities. The easiest example is the Crime downtime activity in Xanathar's. 3 checks, with 3 skills, which can be changed with a different approach because that is just how 5e works, and scaling results depending on number of successes.

It's an exceptionally good model for dealing with traps, magical/mechanical devices, improvised rituals, social encounters, and all sorts of other stuff.

Using this idea, it's much easier for every character to have ways to contribute to every major challenge, because why not let the Barbarian use Athletics in a social challenge by distracting all the court dandies with her impressive physical prowess, or let the Rogue use Acrobatics to get people excited in a dance and get people talking?

Well XP for leveling died for me a couple of editions ago, so I wouldn't mind it. For a long time there has been general advice along the lines of giving people XP for overcoming an obstacle without resorting to combat and that non-combat encounters can reward XP. Since my games haven't been particularly combat heavy for a long time, I found myself just handing out XP for non-combat based on how quickly we wanted to level. Once I realized that I just started ignoring XP altogether.

Yeah only time I tracked xp was in 4e, because the system made a lot of sense and worked very logically and intuitively. A given level of thing gave X experience, with special modifiers increasing that amount, so a level 3 standard challenge or monster cost X, and making it Elite or more complex or whatever increased that amount by an amount fairly commensurate with the increase in challenge.

"Keep on the Shadowfell" was a godawful slog because it was an adventure built around attrition fights, in an edition which did not support that in the slightest. People hated KotS, with good reason... but was it because of the edition's choice to not support attrition fights, or the adventure's choice to use them anyway?

Which is too bad, because the story of the adventure is pretty good.

I'd love it if D&D came up with some compromise between their traditional XP system and milestone XP. Something that actually can be considered a system, but which is actually easily managed at the table, and on a character sheet. It should be as easy as tracking arrows or any other resource.

I think part of the key would be to just reduce the numbers down to a point where a small challenge at low level can be worth 1 XP, remove the idea of splitting total xp and just award xp per character, and moving away from XP values per creature (or giving everything a level, and working out a simple key for XP per level involved in a challenge, so a level 3 puzzle with 2 level 2 traps and a level 3 guardian statue would be worth, say, 9xp per character, regardless of how they're overcome).

That's because the "role-play is superior to roll-play, which makes me superior for being a real role-player" mind-virus remains alive and well and endemic in the gaming population at large.

There is definitely some of that, but it's also simply that not everyone benefits creatively from gating roleplaying behind mechanics and dice rolls, and for some people as a result, dnd facilitates RP more than games with more detailed social mechanics. Combine thatwith the tropes of the DnD player options that make it easy for casual and new players to slip right into the RP, and yeah, sometimes we go several sessions without any fights.

It seems weird to me to play a campaign of dnd and not have segments or groups of sessions that play very differently from other segments. I'm not going to switch games because my group wants to do something that is basically a heist, and I'm not going to tell them "well dnd is made for xyz, so we should just stick to that", either. The other people in the group feel the same way.

So when the story unfolds in a way that means we really should attend the Althing and convince the people of the North to create a War Council to help us safeguard the seals of the Goetic Reticulum that keeps fiends in their pit that are being broken by cultists, which is going to require pooling resources, training every able-bodied person we can get to fight spellcasters and minor fiends, and set up messaging stations and watchtowers, and various other tasks that we can't reasonably do ourselves, we are going to spend as many sessions as it takes to wheel and deal, feed people, solve little problems for people, convince allies to pledge support to people on the fence, and basically do a 6 session story arc with exactly 1 fight, culminating in a speech from our Folk Hero ranger/druid who is now known as The Voice of The Mountain, and a vote that is resolved based on the various checks we made over those several sessions leading up to the day of the speech and vote.

It would be completely bonkers, to us, to not do the above. Moving the story away from that arc, using a different system for one story arc, etc, just aren't things that are ever going to happen, especially when we enjoy playing this stuff in DnD.

Actually, it works for that, too, and by design. The unit of milestones then is scenes. Have a tense negotiation with the Imperial ambassador that goes well? Everyone gets 3 XP. Sneak into the Viscounts room at bight and discover evidence of a conspiracy? Everyone gets 2 XP.

DCC is an "OSR" game, but they want to incentize playing out old school genre stories, not just fights.

Oh hey, that is very similar to how xp works in my system, Quest For Chevar! Of course in QfC, XP is spent on traits and skills, and you gain a level when you've spent a number of XP, and gain a few small increases when you level, but the xp awarding paradigm is basically the same.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think part of the key would be to just reduce the numbers down to a point where a small challenge at low level can be worth 1 XP, remove the idea of splitting total xp and just award xp per character, and moving away from XP values per creature (or giving everything a level, and working out a simple key for XP per level involved in a challenge, so a level 3 puzzle with 2 level 2 traps and a level 3 guardian statue would be worth, say, 9xp per character, regardless of how they're overcome).

Right, that’s much simpler than totaling all rewards and dividing per PC and so on. I’d also want there to be things unique to each player and/or character, too. The issue with that, though, as much as I would like it, is that it opens up the possibility for level disparity among the PCs.

Which is, I think, one of the major benefits of the milestone approach. All the characters are always the same level (generally speaking). Which I think is important for D&D, given the ever escalating power scale that’s in play.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Right, that’s much simpler than totaling all rewards and dividing per PC and so on. I’d also want there to be things unique to each player and/or character, too. The issue with that, though, as much as I would like it, is that it opens up the possibility for level disparity among the PCs.

Which is, I think, one of the major benefits of the milestone approach. All the characters are always the same level (generally speaking). Which I think is important for D&D, given the ever escalating power scale that’s in play.

Yeah, I think that you can probably get away with a few individual sources of XP, as long as most of yourXP is group based, but in a level based game you gotta be careful about that.

Another way to do it is to have a checklist at the end of an adventure or story arc, or session, where you tally up how many individual ticks everyone has gotten collectively, and use that to award group XP, but that's some extra steps I'm not sure are worth it.

I personally also don't prefer the potential for prescriptive play nature of individual XP triggers, as @payn expressed a little upthread, but it can be done well in some cases, like how advancing skills work in The One Ring.

You don't level from individual ticks, but instead you get a tick in a group of skills any time you get an extreme result on a test with one of those skills, up to a certain number, and gain additional skill ranks in that group when you level. But this is more complex, requires more remembering of an irregularly occurring reward trigger (which is basically a power tax on people with ADHD and other executive function disabilities), and still leads to some PCs being more powerful than others, even if some players don't remember to tick the boxes every time they're supposed to, because random distribution isn't actually even unless you look at a data set much greater than the number of skill tests in a TTRPG campaign.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this in the first couple iterations of my TTRPG.

 

[Staffan]

Yeah, see all that is, to me, juice that's not worth the squeeze.

I want some player facing stuff that's not simply tied to monsters defeated or even challenges faced. Maybe something related to BIFTs or other character related elements. Probably some based on class, as well. Just small achievable goals that they can complete each session, and get a point for it. Something like that. Keep the numbers manageable, vary up the tasks, make it all easy to track and observe.... that's what I'd like to see.

I mean, once you've made the change from "thousands of XP" or "one milestone" to "single- or low double-digit ticks" for leveling up, exactly what awards a tick is a matter of details.

That said, my personal preference would be to only award "ticks" for group achievements, and use role-playing awards for more ephemeral rewards – either in-game things or a meta-currency like Inspiration. But that's mainly because I like keeping the group at the same level, so individual awards have to do something other than level you up.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So my feeling is 5E doesn't seem an obvious fit for Doctor Who to me, but I also don't think just because a game has 90% of its rules oriented around combat (and not saying 5E does, just using the number offered in the thread title), that doesn't make the game 90% about combat. Lots of games have rules for combat because that is the most contested space in play. But you can still have 99% of the game be about social interaction and role-play, without specific rules for those things (personally I find less rules around social interaction makes for better RP----just in my personal experience).

What I liked about the Vortex system in terms of Who, is stuff like the initiative system, which gave space to roleplaying in a way that felt very doctor who. And I also liked the loose and adaptable way it used attributes and skills. There were plenty of other things too, but those are the key things that stand out in my memory from the times I have run it. That is different in my mind from the question of whether having the bulk of rules focus on combat, makes a game all about combat. Provided you have a GM making rulings in a game, then you have the resolution system you need for anything that could arise outside combat

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I mean, once you've made the change from "thousands of XP" or "one milestone" to "single- or low double-digit ticks" for leveling up, exactly what awards a tick is a matter of details.

That said, my personal preference would be to only award "ticks" for group achievements, and use role-playing awards for more ephemeral rewards – either in-game things or a meta-currency like Inspiration. But that's mainly because I like keeping the group at the same level, so individual awards have to do something other than level you up.

Using narrative rewards and meta-currency is a great idea.

In my game (I hope I'm not getting annoying bringing it up so often in these topics), you can gain narrative rewards that have mechanical weight, but that are fairly loosely defined and largely up to the player. For instance, Favors are gained when you help out or otherwise accrue social credit with someone who has the means to help you in the future. You just mark a favor, and who it's with, and any note you need to remember what that character's deal is, and when you spend it you propose how they're able to help you or what you want from them.

You can also spend Favors to build a stronger relationship with that character and turn them into a Contact, which is basically someone who you have a social line of credit with, rather than them owing you a favor. You can call upon a Contact for help once between extended rests without any cost (as long as your ask is reasonable and within their wheelhouse), and can do so again at the risk of straining the relationship, and then having to spend an Endeavor during an extended rest to repair the relationship before you can call upon them again. You might also be able to do them a Favor to repair the relationship.

But Quest for Chevar also treats Techniques (basically spells and maneuvers) like a dnd wizard treats spells. You can learn them during play or by spending XP, and they can be used as rewards. eg, you save the troll king's daughter, and she teaches you a charm to disguise your appearance or appear to be in a space other than where you actually are. Since Techniques always cost Atribute Points, which are limited and refresh somewhat slowly, learning new techniques isn't so much a direct power boost as a broadening of your toolkit.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Perhaps, but there is distinction. In my game you can explore character, setting, story in any way you see fit. Traumas in Blades are specific, like XP awards in traditional play. Knowing specifics locks in specific types of play. That's what I want to avoid no matter how good you are at following the specifics, its still always and only the specifics.

I have some large quibbles around what "explore" means here, but that aside, absolutely this is a reasonable thing to want. D&D isn't about finding out what happens when your character is exposed to serious mental and emotional trauma, it's about Big Damned Heroes doing the heroic stuff. That's 100% cool -- part of the reason I like D&D in general is that it's based in those kinds of hero tropes. So giving players the ability to pick everything about their character and to never put that in danger are pretty essential to this kind of play. It's kind like putting on a character costume and doing heroics -- lots of fun!

But if you're going to play a game where characters are actually at risk from more than death and disappointment, then mechanics can help by providing non-fiat points at which this can happen. And, even here, it's still pretty important to make sure that those occur with at least some player control. To earn a trauma in Blades, you have to expend all your stress. This is entirely a player choice -- the only way to lose stress is to choose to spend it. And then, you get a trauma. You get to pick the trauma -- you describe what it is and how you got it. So you get to choose to pick one up because it's a worthwhile cost to you AND then you get to pick what it is. AND then you get to decide if it comes up at all. You should, and you get that sweet XP if it does, but it's your choice. You can fight your trauma or embrace it however you wish as a player. In FATE, you go in knowing you have a character trait that can be compelled -- you pick it with this in mind and it's 100% absolutely part of the character you choose to play. Sure, the GM can invoke it, but they have to pay you to do it, and you can refuse and pay it off instead. This kind of mechanic is only there to provide a cost/benefit incentive to playing the character you built.

If you listen to posters like @Oofta, you might think that all social mechanics are like diplomancy in 3.5 or some chart that arbitrarily tells you how to play your character. This couldn't be further from the truth. I'll gleefully join in trashing those kinds of mechanics. Well designed mechanics provide a springboard to roleplaying.