D&D 5E Would you play D&D if you knew there would be no combat?

[abirdcall]

Even for a session? The OP doesn't give a time frame.

You can play the game fine without endlessly murdering things. It even says so in the DMG!

. . . but I know, nobody reads the DMG.

Obviously it will be rare for all 3 pillars to be engaged in a single moment, so most of the time only 1 or 2 will be going on at any given time.

You're just twisting things around now.

No one has said that combat must be occurring at all times.

 

[Ath'kethin]

Obviously it will be rare for all 3 pillars to be engaged in a single moment, so most of the time only 1 or 2 will be going on at any given time.

You're just twisting things around now.

No one has said that combat must be occurring at all times.

But that's where I'm a little confused. The OP asked about playing with no combat. My enthusiastic yes was met with an assertation that it isn't D&D if a pillar is missing.

I found that odd because the OP didn't specify a time frame for no combat. Hence my question about whether it still "counts" as D&D if there is a pillar missing for a session. And if the answer is "yes," how many sessions in a row can lack, say, exploration, before it's no longer D&D?

Understand that I absolutely believe that D&D can do and be anything, and over 25+ years I've done a lot of it - all while using settings and resources with official D&D logos on them. I'm happy to mix and match in stuff from anything from He-Man to My Little Pony to matchbox cars to accommodate different games and ideas.

After all, my copies of various DMGs have always said I could.

 

[Anoth]

I will add that I am curious. I would love to play whatever he has in mind and try to be a productive player and have a good time. I like people that try to shake things up. Create some fun scenarios and see how it goes.

 

[iserith]

I will add that I am curious. I would love to play whatever he has in mind and try to be a productive player and have a good time. I like people that try to shake things up. Create some fun scenarios and see how it goes.

My experience with DMs that advertise all "RP" sessions or no or low-combat sessions is that they have no idea how to make compelling scenes in just the exploration and social interaction pillars. Most of the scenes involve ordering breakfast at the tavern, shopping, interviewing quirky, cagey NPCs, and aimless wandering about. There are no interesting stakes to be found, just endless frustration and boredom. That is not a good session of D&D in my view, even if it's a one-off thing in a regular campaign, though to each their own. Having done enough of this sort of thing in the past, I avoid it now.

 

[Anoth]

My experience with DMs that advertise all "RP" sessions or no or low-combat sessions is that they have no idea how to make compelling scenes in just the exploration and social interaction pillars. Most of the scenes involve ordering breakfast at the tavern, shopping, interviewing quirky, cagey NPCs, and aimless wandering about. There are no interesting stakes to be found, just endless frustration and boredom. That is not a good session of D&D in my view, even if it's a one-off thing in a regular campaign, though to each their own. Having done enough of this sort of thing in the past, I avoid it now.

I’ve run into that alot and even in Cthulhu where combat is normally a minor but lethal part of the game. Anyone can draw a dungeon on graph paper and populate it with critters. Developing intense social and exploration can be very difficult and challenging. It takes lots of experience and training.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I certainly think that changing the fundamental expectations of play is something that can be done. It would likely take some serious effort on the group’s part, and in particular, the DM’s part.

You’d have to consider what options to even allow. A Fighter isn’t going to be all that useful in such a game; do you remove the class, or do you change it so that there’s more opportunity to contribute?

You probably want to expand on social interaction rules, like Persuasion and Deception and the like. There’s some easy ways to do that, but you’d likely want to establish them before hand. Having everything boil down to one CHA check seems a bit boring and overly simple. So do you go with skill challenges? Something else?

Skill selection is likely going to be huge in such a game, so skills by class and background may need some consideration. Backgrounds would seem to be almost more important than class, in some ways....there’s almost always some social aspect of a background.

Certain spells would become very desirable. Charm Person for example is a low level spell whose impact would go up quite a bit. You’d likely have to consider changes to it since the likelihood that the caster or his allies break it by attacking is gone. There’d be lots of potential changes like that to consider.

Much of this likely could be abdicated on the fly, but for players to have a clear understanding and make informed decisions, you’d likely have to do a good amount of it ahead of time.

Such a game might really be a lot of fun. My question is if the work I think it would take would be worth the effort compared to picking up another system and using that.

I think the answer to that would depend on exactly what you were trying to achieve....intrigue/espionage or horror/survival or what...and what decisions you went with to try and achieve it.

 

[abirdcall]

But that's where I'm a little confused. The OP asked about playing with no combat. My enthusiastic yes was met with an assertation that it isn't D&D if a pillar is missing.

I found that odd because the OP didn't specify a time frame for no combat. Hence my question about whether it still "counts" as D&D if there is a pillar missing for a session. And if the answer is "yes," how many sessions in a row can lack, say, exploration, before it's no longer D&D?

Well how long is a session?

Can you dig half a hole?

What is the definition of pornography?

Some amount of time will occur between combat. That's not only okay but necessary.

Personally, my ideal is 1/3 of game time though I'm happy with anything as little as 20% or so. I wouldn't play in a game with under 10%. I don't think a game with 0% combat is 5e D&D.

Understand that I absolutely believe that D&D can do and be anything,

Then the label/name "D&D" means nothing.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

Not as a champion fighter or barbarian berserker, but I can see pretty much every other character option in the core game playing fine in a game with no combat-related challenges.

I don't think I can agree with the general opinion going through this thread about the mechanics of D&D not supporting that kind of gameplay. Almost every 5e character is heavily defined by spell selection and could be tailored to take on exploration and social interaction challenges instead of combat ones.

That said, I think we would need a very creative DM to fulfill that satisfactorily.

 

[Celebrim]

My experience with DMs that advertise all "RP" sessions or no or low-combat sessions is that they have no idea how to make compelling scenes in just the exploration and social interaction pillars. Most of the scenes involve ordering breakfast at the tavern, shopping, interviewing quirky, cagey NPCs, and aimless wandering about. There are no interesting stakes to be found, just endless frustration and boredom. That is not a good session of D&D in my view, even if it's a one-off thing in a regular campaign, though to each their own. Having done enough of this sort of thing in the past, I avoid it now.

Almost certainly you were dealing with a DM that tried to improvise everything, often under the bad excuse that they are expecting the PC's to improvise everything.

You aren't for example diplomats negotiating for the surrender of the town so that a large army outside won't have to sack it, or investigators trying to discover how a man was murdered inside a locked room barred from the inside, or fleeing from a tsunami as it gobbles up a city, etc. Those are scenarios in a low combat RPG. Ordering breakfast can be a compelling scene, and I do recall one very memorable game of Chill that turned on me RPing out the act of ordering breakfast, but it was memorable only because it was part of a larger storyline. It's not story in and of itself.

 

[pemerton]

There's at least some combat in every RPG, even the ones focused on personal interaction or investigation.

There's no combat in Cthulhu Dark.

Our Classic Traveller game had no combat in its first two sessions, and has had other sessions without combat. But Traveller has a good range of fairly robust action resolution rules for other situations (dealing with bureaucrats; jumping from ship to ship in a vacc suit; etc).

I answered No to the poll not because I'm averse to no-combat or low-combat RPGing, but because I wouldn't use D&D for that. Most of the action resolution in D&D is focused on resolving combat, and (outside of 4e skill challenges) D&D tends to lack robust non-combat resolution frameworks.