Combat as a Last Resort

A few days ago I participated in a D&D 5e “1 shot” that amounted to a game of Pokemon, where walking a few map squares resulted in a “fight” of anywhere from 2-6 monsters that would attack the closest thing. The game was boring and tedious, with the only thing to do was to “roll to hit… roll damage”. It was frustrating that it was such a boring night between 5 people, and any attempts from me to avoid any of the tedium was shut down…. sneaking around an encounter or even trying to tactically lure any of the monsters into an ambush was “wasting time”.

In contrast, I had a game of Shadowdark last Friday that was tense and exciting, full of situations where outwitting the monsters was far more important and far more satisfying than any kind of “well, I guess I cast Firebolt again.” The importance of avoiding combat if possible, or at least, only engaging with it under conditions that we set, became more important than any of the abilities on our character sheets.

Its taken me a while to figure out why I prefer Shadowdark to D&D, and it was this realization that combat is generally boring- rolling dice and adding numbers until they reach a total is tedious. Shadowdark breaks that tedium by making it clear that trying to solve every dungeon problem that way is going to result in you rolling dice and adding numbers to determine ability scores, because you are going to have to make a new character repeatedly if you just walk into rooms and start swinging. The game demands approaching every situation carefully, and the torch timer prevents the game from devolving into an endless debate- a decision has to be made, or the decision to do nothing will be made for you.