Is D&D "about" combat?

[Crispy Critter]

I voted no.

I always felt D&D was about exploration. What was the secret of Bone Hill? What was the even more sinister secret of Saltmarsh? How chaotic are the caves near the Keep on the Borderlands? Wanna risk your life to find treasure on the Isle of Dread? Etc......

Obviously combat is a part of the exploration, but so is treasure hunting and seeking out ancient lore and negotiating with strange creatures in stranger places and solving centuries old mysteries and discovering parts of a world that hadn't been seen by people in a very long time.

 

[Dannager]

The main problem with saying D&D is about some thing is you also define what it's not, and that starts to define deviation from what the game is about. And that's badwrongfun territory. If D&D isn't about traipsing through faerie rings, what does that mean if you play D&D that way? If it's about combat, what does it mean if you only have combat 1 in 4 or 5 sessions? Does it mean you're not playing it right?

It means that you are not playing it as the person writing imagines it to be played (on the whole), and when that person is the group that created the game, it means that you are not playing it as the game was envisioned to be played (on the whole) by its creators.

Mind the leap from "We created D&D to cater to this playstyle," to "How dare you tell me that I'm playing it wrong!" It's quite the chasm.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I think a skirmish miniatures wargame is about combat. D&D, on the other hand, is a step away from that. Combat remains an important element in D&D, of course, and one that requires a good chunk of rules to support it, but D&D goes beyond being "about combat" and puts the main focus elsewhere: on exploration, or on adventure, or on roleplay, et cetera. I'd say that's exactly what distinguishes D&D from a campaign game of Chainmail or D&D Minis.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

The main problem with saying D&D is about some thing is you also define what it's not, and that starts to define deviation from what the game is about. And that's badwrongfun territory. If D&D isn't about traipsing through faerie rings, what does that mean if you play D&D that way? If it's about combat, what does it mean if you only have combat 1 in 4 or 5 sessions? Does it mean you're not playing it right?

That's not entirely right though. Something can certainly be more than one thing at a time. Saying that D&D is about combat doesn't mean that it is ONLY about combat. Just that the focus of the game is combat.

Again, I'm not seeing how this is a terribly controversial point of view.

If you're playing D&D and only having 1 combat in 5 sessions, I'd say that you might not be playing it wrong, but, you're certainly into territory that the rules don't really cover.

 

[UnknownAtThisTime]

Conflict.

 

[Dannager]

Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the game of D&D is primarily about combat (with plenty of other things thrown in for good measure), and that the experience of D&D is about any number of things.

The game is what is in the pages, and the experience is what is created by the people huddled around your game table.

 

[Dannager]

That's not entirely right though. Something can certainly be more than one thing at a time. Saying that D&D is about combat doesn't mean that it is ONLY about combat. Just that the focus of the game is combat.

Again, I'm not seeing how this is a terribly controversial point of view.

If you're playing D&D and only having 1 combat in 5 sessions, I'd say that you might not be playing it wrong, but, you're certainly into territory that the rules don't really cover.

And, arguably, when you reach territory that the rules no longer cover, you're not really playing the game anymore so much as doing something else. Remember, without rules there is no game.

 

[Umbran]

I honestly think that one does not have a proper understanding of what the game is about until they are familiar with the (even rough) purpose behind its design.

Well, at this point D&D has had several designs, by several people, presumably with different purposes.

In fiction, part of the point of a work is to convey the author's purpose to the audience. If the author doesn't do that adequately within the work, if they have to explain themselves outside the work, well, that seems to be a bit of a failure on the author's part. I think the same holds here.

Also, in fiction, there are several versions of "what the thing means" or "what this is about". I usually think that what the audience *gets* out of it is somewhat more telling than what the author intended - what they meant to do is not the same as what they actually communicate or accomplish. I think that's also true here.

 

[Dannager]

In fiction, part of the point of a work is to convey the author's purpose to the audience. If the author doesn't do that adequately within the work, if they have to explain themselves outside the work, well, that seems to be a bit of a failure on the author's part. I think the same holds here.

I agree. But I think that perceptions are prone to being colored by things other than the work in question, especially if one's first exposure to the work in question wasn't the work itself.

Many (most?) people's first real exposure to D&D isn't through reading the books, but rather through playing the game. If you play D&D with a group that is all about character interaction and really sort of glides right through the combat parts with a wave of the hand, when you go to pick up the rule books you'll probably read them with an eye for things that are not combat related, because that's what you've been conditioned to expect and appreciate from your group's gameplay.

It is very difficult, in reading the rule books, to come to the conclusion that D&D isn't about combat. So much of the rules is designed to help facilitate that sort of conflict. There's plenty of other stuff in there, but that other stuff is spread out over such a wide spectrum of activities and themes as to be pretty clearly secondary when it came to design considerations.

Granted, I am speaking as someone who has really only familiarized himself with five or six editions of D&D. It may be that this was different back in the day, but I suspect not really.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I find some of the statements in this thread to be quite amusing.

D&D isn't about combat, in my opinion. It's not even primarily about combat, in my opinion.