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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9773727" data-attributes="member: 86653">They're separate issues. How the designers assumed people would play and how people actually played.The design of 5E is largely a massive rejection of 4E design with several elements from 4E "hidden" in 5E's design. 4E was an encounter-based minis skirmish game. Lots of people loved it, more people hated it. So 5E returned to the notion of the day as the power focus, instead of the encounter. D&D has been a monster-fighting game since at least 2E, if not AD&D. So the focus on combat isn't a mystery. So the designed a monster-fighting game where you had enough resources to last a full adventuring day. Having a 5-minute workday is a problem as old as D&D, which 4E solved, which 5E embraced. So here we are.If people actually played 5E as an endless string of combats, as it was clearly designed to do, then we wouldn't have had the troubles we've had since launch. See the post from one of the lead designers in the OP and the immediate flood of "I don't want 6-8 encounters per day" or "I don't want ~20 rounds of combat between long rests." But most people playing don't do that. Why? Because the overwhelmingly vast majority of players are new to D&D with 5E thanks to Critical Role and Stranger Things. CR rather famously focuses on story over combat, despite having plenty of combat. So the overwhelmingly vast majority of players play the game as a more story-focused game...which it isn't and certainly wasn't designed to be. They do 1-2 fights per day and...surprise...steamroll those combats.They designed the game as a daily-recharge dungeon crawler. The design choices, the math balance, etc all point to that. About 90-95% of the game's mechanics are focused on combat. Exploration and social interaction are almost vestigial afterthoughts and there are many, many options in the game that give the players skip buttons for those scenes...either finishing them with a single roll or simply pointing to a feature on their sheet which ends the non-combat scene, all this pushes the game back to combat.Sure, you can try to focus on non-combat stuff, but the game fights you. See the hundreds of threads on beefing up exploration and social encounters over the last decade.</blockquote>

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