D&D 5E "When DMing I Avoid Making the PCs have 'pointless' combats." (a poll)

[Maxperson]

I answered false because...

1. I have random encounters, which are by definition pointless to the story. Not pointless overall, because XP and treasure have a point.
2. I include encounters with monsters well below the party level on occasion. Sometimes I just narrate a quick and dirty fight with the PCs winning, but taking a bit of damage due to bounded accuracy. Sometimes we have the fight, because it can be a lot of fun for PCs to easily trounce some monsters once in a while. Every fight doesn't have to have the risk of life and death and it can feel good to flex, causing an ogre to die.

 

[jdrakeh]

I minimize pointless combat. Pointless combat, to me, is combat that doesn't add anything interesting to the game or else move the story forward. A lot of random encounters fit this bill. They're time-wasters that exist only to sap player resources. I use them sparingly.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I run mostly prewritten published adventures and a lot of the combats can be fairly pointless given the way some parties exceed the default expectations of the system. I don not adjust most of the encounters but run them as it because it allows the party to flex their prowess.

 

[Stormonu]

“Pointless” is a loaded word, TBH.

How many would change their answer if the question was “All my combat encounters are directly related to the story at hand”?

 

[Celebrim]

I run settings based on verisimilitude to genre. Combat occurs whenever genre conventions suggest combat could occur and not when it makes sense for the primary plot to have a combat. In other words, the primary plot might have to do with stopping a bunch of evil necromancers, but you'll still have fights in the catacombs with the sort of monsters you'd find in catacombs, or fights in the jungles with the sort of monsters you'd find in jungles regardless of whether those fights advance the plot or necessarily force the expenditure of considerable resources. You are going to face the same things if you go to a particular location regardless of your level and regardless of whether you are a PC or an NPC. The world exists outside of Your Story and is not organized around Your Story.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

“Pointless” is a loaded word, TBH.

How many would change their answer if the question was “All my combat encounters are directly related to the story at hand”?

Writing surveys are hard... it's super easy to make it point to one way or the other

 

[CleverNickName]

I let the players pick their own battles...and they tend to pick pointless ones.

Haggling with a merchant, trying to save 10gp on the cost of a suit of armor...didn't pass their Persuasion roll...escalates to Intimidation instead...merchant gets angry and threatens to call the guards...so obviously the party attacks him...so he calls the guards...now the party's under arrest...of course the party resists...now they're incarcerated...

...and all because of 10gp.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I let the players pick their own battles...and they tend to pick pointless ones.

Haggling with a merchant, trying to save 10gp on the cost of a suit of armor...didn't pass their Persuasion roll...escalates to Intimidation instead...merchant gets angry and threatens to call the guards...so obviously the party attacks him...so he calls the guards...now the party's under arrest...of course the party resists...now they're incarcerated...

...and all because of 10gp.

yup... this checks out

 

[Celebrim]

Writing surveys are hard... it's super easy to make it point to one way or the other

Another way to look at this is writing surveys are easy. No matter what result you want, you can always rig the survey to favor your own viewpoint and prove it's the more popular one. And if that question didn't work, well you don't have to release the results, you can always make up a new question and try again. Or, do 10 questions and only release the results for the ones that made your point.

 

[Jer]

I marked True. Because I can't even imagine a pointless combat in the game I run anymore. If there's an encounter and the PCs escalate it into a combat encounter, who am I to decide it's pointless and try to deescalate it? If I'm rolling on a random table for a random encounter, then it's part of the game and has some kind of point - I wouldn't have made up the random encounter table to use if I didn't think there was a point to using it, and if I thought there was no point in rolling on it I'd just skip rolling on it.

I suppose a pointless combat might be one where the PCs so outmatch their foes that it's not going to be interesting or fun for anyone but for everything to make sense there really should be a fight where the players just stomp on their foes - at which point we'll likely just do it as a montage instead of as a tactical combat to save the time. I suppose that might count as avoiding a pointless combat? If we do it narratively instead of tactically?