D&D is more than just one game

To people outside the hobby, D&D is an … ‘unusual’ game.

Little do they know, it’s not really a game at all.

It’s games.

Most experienced players are already vaguely aware of this, even if it’s not something they consciously think about. They might have read about the three pillars (combat, exploration, social interaction). They know about downtime. They appreciate that the game becomes kind of ‘different’ when the DM says the magic words, ‘Roll Initiative.’ But they probably don’t really notice the shift from one type of game to another.

That’s because D&D isn’t one game but a framework made up of multiple, overlapping mini-games: tactical skirmishing, collaborative storytelling, exploration puzzles, and improvisational social play. These modes can blend together so smoothly that you don’t notice when you’re switching from one to the other—until something feels off.

So, what are the ‘games’ of D&D? And why does it matter?

In my experience—which at this point is coming up to a quarter of a century, which is terrifying, and barely half the time that D&D has been around for—D&D is at its most fun when you lean into the premise. The clue’s in the name: dungeons, dragons. I really felt this when we played through Dungeon of the Mad Mage together. You’re playing the game as originally intended, and the rules are still fundamentally about the concept of fighting monsters and exploring adventure sites. If you stay close to this ‘game,’ you will pretty much always have a good time.

But when you start moving away from the core premise of the game—loot dungeons, kill monsters—it’s like pulling at an elastic band. The more you pull, the more tension, and eventually it will either snap back to where you were before, or just snap altogether.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t innovate and experiment. I’ve seen plenty of cool new ideas come along in the last 25 years. The game has changed, and many of the changes are great. But there are things that 5e D&D just doesn’t do very well. And you may find yourself having less fun even trying.

Understanding the kinds of games D&D does well helps you and your players set better expectations. It can prevent that sinking feeling when a session drags or falls flat. If everyone at the table knows they’re here for tactical challenges, improvisational drama, or dungeon-crawling discovery, they’re more likely to have a good time.

What, then, does D&D ‘do well’?

Small-scale combat

At its heart, D&D is a tactical skirmish game. This makes sense, given the game’s history (it evolved from war games). Consider how combat works: initiative, hit points, armour class, positioning on a grid… And crucially, small squads: a party of four or five adventurers versus no more than a dozen bad guys. When combat moves away from this sort of ‘skirmish’ set-up, it often doesn’t work very well. Hordes of enemies, theatre of the mind, solo boss fights… I’ve run all of them, but none of them are quite as satisfying as the small-scale skirmishes.

Exploration

There’s a debate to be had here about older and newer editions. 5e tends to handwave hexcrawls, torch rationing, dungeon-mapping, and so on, but the fundamental game of ‘discovering new things’ is still there, and for many groups it’s a game that doesn’t necessarily need to be codified. It also survives with mini-games like traps, riddles, puzzles, and so on.

Collaborative storytelling

I’d call this a game, because it’s completely supplementary to the mechanics of combat and exploration. Without the storytelling, you don’t have a roleplaying game, just a very advanced board game. The game is powered by a very simple cycle: DM describes, players react, DM reacts, etc. It doesn’t need any more rules than that.

Improvisational roleplay

Again, maybe you don’t see this as a ‘game’—but I think it is. Not in a competitive sense, necessarily, but as a game of player-driven interaction. Sure, sometimes it’s just funny voices and playing pretend, but sometimes there’s an in-game drive for a social interaction to be successful, and how successfully the players ‘play it’ will matter later on.

So far, so obvious. What, then, does D&D struggle with?

Mass combat

Many, many people have tried to hack D&D to make mass combat work, to varying degrees of success. And honestly, the best advice seems to boil down to the same thing: treat the warfare as window dressing, and focus on key set pieces between the PCs and small groups of enemies. In other words—skirmishes! Everything about the scale of D&D suggests that it works better with small groups. Huge armies might sound fun, but it’s a different game.

Player versus Player (PvP)

Character classes are designed to complement each other. The strongest parties are those that know how to cover each other’s weak spots and work as a team, and the rules reflect this. Fighters hold the front line, wizards control the battlefield, rogues hit high-value targets, clerics keep everyone alive. It’s fantastic fun when it all comes together. Once you try to pit different classes against each other, though, you realize that it… doesn’t quite work. The rogue hits hard but dies quickly without a meat shield. Ditto the wizard. The cleric has no one to bless or heal, and the fighter is all on their own. It’s not as fun.

Narrative-only

This might seem contradictory to what I wrote above about collaborative storytelling and improvisational roleplay, but I guess what I want to get across is that D&D still has dice, mechanics, and consequences. It is not a pure storytelling game; it still relies on, for want of a better word, numbers, maths. For me, this was one of the main reasons why The Wild Beyond the Witchlight fell flat. The adventure encourages players to resolve encounters through social interaction alone, without needing to roll dice. And while that sounds like it should deepen roleplay, it often felt like the outcomes didn’t really depend on the characters’ abilities, just what the players decided to say. Without risk, chance, or mechanical stakes, those scenes started to feel more like scripted theatre than interactive play.

Simulationism

It’s pleasing that the new Dungeon Master’s Guide addresses this directly (although kind of depressing that it feels it needs to): it now states that ‘rules aren’t physics’ and ‘the game is not an economy’ (p 19). Good. Yes, it’s pleasing when a game world feels real and believable. But the key word is feels. Mechanics that try to simulate a real world in granular detail—climate, demographics, economics, whatever—are probably missing the point a bit, and ultimately moving away from what the game does best.

Final disclaimer

None of this is meant as gatekeeping, and hopefully it doesn’t read as such. If you successfully use D&D for mass combat, PvP, storytelling games, and deep simulationist world-building: great! Share how! But generally speaking, I don’t think they are as well-supported by the game’s structure. As always, happy to be proved wrong!

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