D&D is a Problem-Solving Game

The argument that D&D is combat game goes like this: A game is "about" what it has rules for. Because D&D (specifically 5e) has far more rules for combat than for anything else, it's a combat game. 

I don't really have or care to have an opinion as to whether "system matters", aside from the simple fact that one should play a system they enjoy, and that yes, there are other games besides D&D which facilitate an experience that is not like D&D. D&D is not the all-encompassing system that some people treat it like it is. I don't want to play a 5e-compatible farming simulator or whatever, but I also don't care much if someone else decides to till that barren soil.

I do think things are a bit more nuanced than "If most of a game's rules pertain to X, then the game is about X." So, I wanted to try to articulate what kind of game I think D&D is.

Is D&D a combat game?

I see it broadly like this: D&D is first and foremost a fantasy roleplaying game. More specifically: D&D is a fantasy problem-solving game, with a greater or lesser focus towards combat as the primary problem-solving method, depending on the edition, DM, and players. Different editions have greater or fewer rules for things other than combat. Different DMs prepare greater or fewer scenarios which they anticipate the players will resolve using combat. Different players are more or less inclined towards fighting everything their characters encounter.

5e, allegedly, specifically leans towards combat because it has a lot of DM- and player-facing rules for it. There are a lot of monsters, for example, and most of the statistics for those monsters are oriented towards fighting them. Most character abilities are combat abilities. The DMG goes into great detail as to how to create a combat encounter.

The very specific guidelines for building combat encounters (plus online tools to assist in doing so) makes it relatively easy to quickly create a combat scenario that is "balanced" for the player characters' level to the DM's taste (i.e. easy, medium, hard, or deadly).

If the DM has a session coming up, and nothing prepped, it's easy to open the Monster Manual, pick a monster for the player characters to fight that week, and build an appropriate encounter which will eat up a lot of game time. It's easy to force the player characters to fight something - the monster of the week is causing problems, and if the player characters go investigate, it attacks them and tries to kill them - now they have to kill it. It's a convenient crutch for the unprepared or inexperienced DM.

It's not so easy to instead create a non-hostile NPC to oppose the player characters socially, determine why they're opposed to the characters, what would convince them to leave the characters alone, and how hard it should be to convince them to do so. It's not so easy to design such an encounter to take up all or most of a session. It's not so easy to force the player characters into a social confrontation with the NPC.

But it's also not impossible. The DMG has guidelines for creating NPCs with ideals, bonds, flaws, and goals, and for adjudicating social interactions with those NPCs. They don't read as strongly as "rules" because, by comparison, combat has numbers and statistics and all sorts of things that appeal to people who think that numbers = rules, and combat in D&D is expected to have that structure. 

Social interaction is looser, and more nebulous, and it should be because it mostly involves person-to-person interaction and only the occasional rolling of dice, informed by predetermined NPC characteristics (again, provided by the DMG) and DM judgment. But because there are fewer hard numbers and because lifelike people in a fantasy world are somewhat hard to conceptualize, many DMs shy away from prepping these types of scenarios in the same way they prep combat scenarios.

So, inexperienced or underprepared DMs are going to tend to lean on combat a lot, prepping many encounters to which the only solution is fighting. Players under such DMs are going to learn to expect to fight most of their problems. If that is one's experience with D&D, it's easy to see why so many people see it as a "combat game".

Ancient Mechanisms

Compared to 5e, older editions have far more mechanics which support modes of play other than combat: rules for generating dungeons and wilderness environments, stocking them, and structured dungeon and wilderness exploration procedures make it easier to prep an exploration scenario; reaction rolls make it more likely that not every monster will immediately attack the player characters - some may even want to help them; morale rules make monsters less likely to fight to the death, which can turn combat encounters into chase scenes or social interactions; player characters gain most XP from acquiring treasure, not killing monsters. 

In the latter case, the goal is to acquire the treasure by any means necessary - if fighting can be avoided, then that's great, because characters can advance without undue risk. The problem to solve is getting the treasure, not killing the monster.

Pretty much all of these mechanics had been discarded by the time we got to 5e: the DMG has a pretty lackluster dungeon generator (with monsters in a whopping 50% of rooms) and an unsatisfying optional morale mechanic; reaction rolls appear only in Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, for some reason; experience points are "most often" rewarded for combat, not gold, though I argue that instead they should be rewarded for overcoming challenges of all kinds.

As a result, a 5e DM will probably only know about these mechanics from familiarity with past editions - either from having played those editions, from reading the old books, or from word of mouth. This is why I'm grateful for blogs and for the OSR: for turning me on to bits of knowledge that make the game far more enjoyable for me and my players, but which have been lost in modern editions of D&D. The blogs, in turn, have peaked my interest in reading about and running older editions of the game.

The problem is that as D&D develops, valuable tools from prior editions are dropped, and those tools are lost to new players who aren't familiar with the game's history. Most new DMs and players are unlikely to be familiar with any edition beyond the current, most popular one, and the current version of the game teaches new DMs - via the DMG - only how to prep combat encounters, and it teaches players - via their characters' abilities - to expect to solve their problems using combat.

Right?

Sort of. 

Goals of Play

It's definitely true that most of 5e's rules lean towards combat, and that the procedures for prepping combat encounters are very mathematically detailed. However, I want to look at the chapter in the DMG on creating adventures, specifically "Location-Based Adventures", on page 72. That section has tables for dungeon goals, wilderness goals, and "other" goals.

All of the goals presented by these tables can be viewed instead as problems to solve. The "Dungeon Goals" table has exactly one entry out of 19 which explicitly says, basically, "Fight a monster" ("Slay a dragon or some other challenging monster"). There are a few other entries that could be loosely interpreted as "fight a monster":

• Stop the dungeon's monstrous inhabitants from raiding the surface world [by fighting them]
• Foil a villain's evil scheme [by fighting them]
• Destroy a magical effect inside the dungeon [by fighting it]
• Pursue fleeing foes taking refuge in the dungeon [and fight them]
• Clear a ruin so it can be rebuilt and reoccupied [by fighting everything inside]

Those are all assumptions, though. The player characters could find out why the dungeon's inhabitants are raiding the surface world, and convince them to stop by other means. The magical effect might not be a monster, but a complex trap to disarm or a restless spirit to placate. The fleeing foes might parley with the characters, or need to be captured (alive) and brought back to civilization to see justice. The ruin to be cleared might be filled with traps and hazards, rather than monsters. 

The other two tables are similarly diverse in the goals they present. What this indicates to me is that 5e is meant to be a problem-solving game, and these tables are prompts with which the DM can generate problems for the players to solve however they wish.

Achieving those goals might involve fighting monsters along the way, but combat is a part of the game (and often, a fun one), and one that both DMs and players anticipate engaging with from time to time.

True, the combat-orientation of D&D's rules might lead the DM and/or players to anticipate combat and prepare or consider no other solutions, leading to a bias towards combat, but that's a playstyle issue. It isn't being strictly enforced by the DMG itself. The fact that the first step in prepping a location-based adventure is to determine the party's goals, and that so few of those goals explicitly state that something has to be fought, suggests to me that player characters are supposed to experience a wide array of goals and problems during their adventuring career.

It's not like fighting is the only skill at the player characters' disposal. They have character knowledge, the ability to perceive and intuit things, social skills, equipment other than weapons, and magical abilities that allow them to understand languages, disguise themselves, charm others, and the like. They can do anything that a person in the real world can do, and more. The players have their own real-life skills and knowledge they can draw upon as well.

The rules for social interaction aren't robust, but they're sufficient; the players (via their characters) and DM (via their NPCs) have a conversation, and when the outcome of that conversation is in doubt, an ability check is rolled, based on the NPC's disposition towards the characters. I drew upon old-school reaction rolls and other materials to make my own social interaction mechanics more robust, because that was my preference, but doing so isn't strictly necessary for this aspect of the game to function. 

Similarly, I supplemented my prep procedures with more old-school mechanics to make combat less of a default method of interacting with NPCs and monsters. 

Well, that's just great - I added some mechanics that aren't in the rules and now my games are less combat-oriented. That doesn't mean the game itself isn't about combat.

But that's the thing - when I think about the statement "D&D is a combat game", I'm not just thinking about the current edition, or how "most" people play it. I'm thinking about D&D in its totality. It isn't one thing. Not even one specific edition is the same across groups - every table plays it differently, and the rules don't prescribe one type of play. I like my modern D&D to feel more like old-school D&D, and I modify things to suit that preference. Other DMs may modify it to feel more like Pathfinder, or Warhammer, or Dark Souls, or Animal Crossing, or whatever - whether they should be playing a different game is a conversation for another time.

So new players maybe play D&D more like a combat game than anything else, but we don't even know that for sure, and the way that most people seem to play the game isn't necessarily the same as the way the game designers are trying to indicate that one should play. It might be easier for a new DM to prepare a combat scenario, which might lead to new DMs preparing more combat scenarios, but the DMG isn't telling DMs to only ever prepare combat scenarios. 

Could the game be designed better to communicate this intent? Probably. But would people actually read the books and thus grasp this intended playstyle, or would they keep on playing their own version of D&D based on their idea of what the game is supposed to be? If the game is designed one way, but people play it another way, which game are we talking about when we say the game is a "combat game"?

So, is D&D a combat game? Yes, kind of, but also only to extent that the DM and players make it about that. I would probably be disappointed to play in a D&D game where I never got to fight a dragon, but I'd also be disappointed to play in one where I never got to talk to a dragon, or where the DM hadn't drawn up the dragon's lair so that we could explore it in detail. Some players and DMs may just want one of those three things, but the game's designers are clearly saying that there should be a mix of all three.