Non Combat: How To Make It Practical

I've heard a lot of players express disinterest or disappointment in a game because of the integration of combat. It is not that a particular system does combat poorly, but that they would rather the game focus around something else, facilitating similar roleplay but without the primary focus being to hunt and kill others. I've tried to interview them about ideas, but most such players lack a sufficient concept of how to play the game otherwise, and so they would just prefer not to play pen-n-paper games at all.

Does anybody here have some ideas for how to shape a roleplaying game around something other than physical violence?

Collecting stuff, trading, exploring, diplomacy, spying, crafting, traveling, solving puzzles, solving murders through interrogation and investigation, escaping from somewhere, non-violent competitions, delivery work, and courting someone, are all ideas that come to mind. Hope that helps! :)

You already have everything necessary in your mind just by living in a civilized world. Can you imagine if someone today consistently resorted to lethal violence to overcome challenges? I mean, I would guess it would be like Syria right now with ISIS and the government. All the poor people that lived there were unnecessary victims of that violence.

To make a game that is engaging and fun that has little to no combat, just look at your everyday challenges in a civilized world. Diplomacy, politics, competitive business practices...there are many ways to shape engagements with players that feel tense but where the goal is not to murder-death-face the problem. Stealth and running tactics are a great tool, too. Be sure that the players know that being found means death, or worse. Being unarmed and virtually helpless against a clan of orcs, for example. So stay hidden and quiet as you progress through this city at night, or castle dungeon, or whatever.

Collecting: Already a part of many games, but not something that compares to the Combat Phase. I cannot think of a way that collecting could be made into a concentrated, fun activity.

Trading: This I could see being interesting, but I'm not sure how to make it a viable replacement for combat.

Exploring: This is already the other half of games like Pathfinder. It can't really replace combat if it is already the other half.

Diplomacy: I could stand to read some good social-conflict systems.

Spying: Like Diplomacy, I could stand to see some good intrigue and espionage mechanics, but I haven't yet.

Crafting: This is promising. Have you seen any crafting systems of interest? Pathfinder's is garbage.

Traveling: Isn't this the same as exploring?

Solving Puzzles: Also good, but coming up with a puzzle system is pretty intensive.

Investigation: Viable in the same way as Spying, but I'd need to see some good material first.

Escaping: See spying.

Non-Violent Competitions: Like what?

Delivery Work: This has promise, but only if done right.

Courting: Never seen romance mechanics in tabletop form. Would really like to.

I think that you can have dangerous situations that appeal to a combat avoider. For example sneaking into a heavily guarded palace to extract a document can be made more thrilling if you know that engaging in combat means certain death. Making the situation where avoiding combat through stealth or intelligence is more rewarding than just punching your way through a problem would be fun to me. I think that the real challenge to a gm is to come up with compelling problems and allowing players the freedom to solve them through whatever means they can imagine.

I think that you can have dangerous situations that appeal to a combat avoider. For example sneaking into a heavily guarded palace to extract a document can be made more thrilling if you know that engaging in combat means certain death. Making the situation where avoiding combat through stealth or intelligence is more rewarding than just punching your way through a problem would be fun to me. I think that the real challenge to a gm is to come up with compelling problems and allowing players the freedom to solve them through whatever means they can imagine.

I definitely agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I'm more talking mechanically. It's one thing for a Game Master to come up with fun things to add into a game, homebrew, but I don't know how such things would be written into a system mechanically. Is combat required as a core mechanic?

There are plenty of games out there where combat isn't the core mechanic (some lack combat as mechanics at all). If your plan is to use DnD/Pathfinder to do this then yes you will need to homebrew/ignore the core mechanic of the games. A lot of PbtA stuff puts combat on an equal footing to other means of engagement, there was that fun card based game where the primary focus was stealth (sorry can't remember what it was called). Questlandia and Noirlandia both have combat as something which you can describe but in no way necessary to the game.

Also a point to make about Justin's comment, you can easily implement this into DnD/Pathfinder without homebrewing, you as the DM would need to create these situations, which by the way is not difficult, ot is hilariously easy to make encounters that can only be defeated by non-combat, like throwing high level monsters with low passive perception against your party, clearly the best way through is to aboid the fight through stealth, or put your party in the middle of a court intrigue, clearly starting a fight isn't going to get anywhere. You as a DM should be able to design encounters that require skills to solve instead of fighting. In DnD if your worried about how much experience to award... why? Just do milestone leveling, it's better for storytelling anyway.

A final point to make though, you seem to be fixated on the idea that mechanics should always be in control, I would advise you to maybe practice running things with a higher focus on RP, giving a more rules light system (such as any PbtA game) might very well be the solution to your players problem.

Chuckleworthy misunderstanding, there. I'm not fixated, I asked a specific question: how to shape a roleplaying game around non-violent solutions. Not a session, not a campaign, not an encounter. A game, specifically a system. It is very easy to modify materials that already exist, or just play differently, but I was talking on a level much higher than that.

So, to lead things in the right direction, you mentioned a couple of games by name. What is the central conflict resolution of Questlandia? What rules govern it? How does stealth work in that card game you mentioned?

So Questlandia and Noirlandia kind of don't have conflict resolution, they have conflict prompts and the players of the game have to weave those conflicts into their story. The game has multiple parts, where the players develope the setting, and then enbody one or more characters in that world, constantly switching between weaving a story about the characters and building up the world. In questlandia in particular the character the players play are people tangentially related to the big hero of the setting, (think the other characters in the Arthurian tales).

I remembered the name of the other game, it's Project Dark by Will Hindmarch (final release still pending). The way it works is that your character sheet informs what cards are in your deck, which is also your 'health pool'. How concealed you are determines the size of your hand, the GM sets challenges before you which requires a certain value to beat, which requires cards from your hand. The suits that you play flavor how you over come it, but obviously playing cards reduces your hand size, so your actions draw more notice, until you need to slink back into the shadows. When bad stuff happens you burn cards fro your deck, this isn't necessarily getting hurt, but also represents loosing resources etc...

There was also that game where you played space delivery people... what was that one called/ what system it use? That also doesn't feature conflict as the prime motive and is good for making engaging stories...

And there was that battle of the bands/ rock apocalypse system built using fate which features only epic rock duels!

In terms of games about investigation, Call of Cthulhu handles that pretty well.

I’ve never seen intrigue done better then Urban Shadows, which is a PbtA game, though Noir World is also pretty good for that.

I guess what I’m trying to show is that there are a tonne of systems that aren’t combat which are all built around different things. If you want to build an RPG that isn’t combat focused you should identify what you and your group want to be doing instead and then find/build something around that.

These are all great resources for somebody looking to play a new pre-existing system. But I'm aware a ton of games exist; my focus for this thread was more about ideas people had for how such a game might be put together, rather than listing names of systems that already exist. Sort of a discussion of concepts, rather than a request for published resources.

I think people understand that, but there dual points might be a.) "Here's your structure, look at that.", and/or b.)"Why reinvent something that is already done well?"

But to follow your question line, I would posit a few specific mechanics:

1. A unified core mechanic. A core dice mechanic where Combat(/Physical conflict), works like Social conflict, works like Mental conflict, works like Exploration, etc. So that not only is it easy to know what to do in any situation, but so that you can mix the various types of conflicts without dealing with multiple "mini-games".

2. A non-physical "health track". A mechanical, non-subjective way to track the "damage" dealt in a conflict that isn't physical damage.

3. Reward mechanics that are not focused on killing things. You gain "XP" (or whatever advancement mechanic) for accomplishing goals, not raising a body count.

4. A non-binary action resolution mechanic. A dice mechanic where there is partial success, partial failure, or similar - complications, advantages, additional narrative results, as well as straight "pass/fail".

All of these ideas I took straight out of Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars system, btdubs.

To counter point A, I would reframe it in this way: if I was looking to discuss writing a sci-fi, and someone just read off a list of names, movies that have already been filmed, books that have already been written, and left it at that...would that be conducive to a good discussion? Like, I'd say it would be somewhat helpful if the person used that as a jumping off point to discuss what those books/films do in detail, and how they might serve as inspiration. But to just list them and state that they are relevant doesn't strike me as helpful.

As for point B, that is the essence of what writers and creative minds do! Everything under the sun has already been attempted in some form. There were tales of space exploration before anyone knew leaving the planet was a possibility. There were tales of visiting other planets when all we'd ever been to was a rock floating around us. So why do people keep doing those things?

Getting to your answers, I have a lot of comments. First of which, I really dig your suggestion about unifying everything to work in a similar fashion. I would need to spend some time thinking about how to make Combat behave like Exploration and conversation, but it definitely sounds doable, and if Fantasy Flight already did it, that just seals it. Then there's the health track, I'm not really sure a health abstraction is necessary if combat is not the central conflict. You could just roleplay that, when someone gets hurt, they are out of commission to some degree until the story dictates otherwise. I.e. if their leg is injured, they continue as normal, but everyone notes that the character is being supported by someone or something at all times. If they're knocked out, they wake up some time later when they have been hauled to safety. One of the big reasons I see non-combat as achievable is because combat is something that could easily be left to roleplay. We've just been conditioned not to think about it that way by games like D&D. Resolving things like social conflict and exploration don't really need a "health bar," just as they don't need to be thought of as "dealing damage."

Do you have an example of awarding XP for things other than kills? The simplest method available to us is "Kill this, get this much xp." I'm not sure how one would standardize something else. Not saying it can't be done, just that I don't have ideas. Hence the discussion.

A non-binary resolution method is definitely the right direction, but I think we could do one better than "partials." What if we created a gridwork of four points, similar to the alignment axes (Good/Evil, Law/Chaos), and the performance of any action, physical or mental, transpires on some point of that grid? Just as an example, if we have one axis be Timely and Time-Consuming (working titles, there's definitely better out there) and the other axis be Expensive and Cheap. Any action that is Timely and Expensive may not be that hard, but could be impossible without the right resources. Any action that is Timely and Cheap probably won't amount to much, and may not even need resolution. Any action that is Time-Consuming and Expensive probably isn't that hard to contribute to, but likely requires the labor of many hands at work. Any action that is Time-Consuming and Cheap would probably land in the category of "most difficult to do alone." Make sense?

A counter point to this, if your writing a hard sci-fi book and asking for tips on how to do so, having only read soft sci-fi books a perfectly good suggestion is, go read these books to learn what kind of tropes you should play with.

Re ‘health tracks’ I don’t think you should take this as literally meaning health, if your making a mechanical system around things there should always be a critical resource to manage, something which you should never allow yourself to run out of or else it’s game over. This gives rise to tension and excitement. Depending on what type of game you want to build this resource could represent influence, or rebound, or perhaps supplies, even stress.

Re exp for non combat, this is handled in a whole bunch of ways depending on how you want to level. There’s the Call of Cthulhu style system which doesn’t have levels per se, but instead your skills have a chance increase if you used them during the game. Urban shadows allows you to level only after you’ve interacted meaningfully with each of the factions in the game. There’s also the classic dnd levelling method, which is literally accumulate a certain amount of gold (ie income also causes xp gain).

How would your proposed success system implement with the resolution mechanic, are you proposing resolution having two aspects to test how fast/expensive it is? I feel like this works more like a difficulty setting mechanism then a partial success/failure system.

Before this conversation continues though I would like to emphasise the importance of settling on what you want todo, I strongly disuade you from trying to build a system that does everything non-combat, as it would likely be a rather clunky and possibly unplayable system. Knowing what kind of things the game will do will make it a lot easier to talk about how it would do them.

I play a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade, where the focus is interpersonal relationships. There is no Challenge Rating handholding... if you get into combat, with another vampire, you dont know if theyre an ancient and you may become dead before you can scream. That being said, there is a ton of drama within the game, as people explore each others secrets and make alliances. We can play for hours and never roll the dice.

The key part of any game is the conflict. Story games like Fiasco and Hillfolk take that truism, that conflict between players can be vastly more rewarding than cooperative play (like D&D).

If you like that model, that the players are in opposition to each other, then you don't need obstacles for them to overcome, which is all that combat is.

@Genisisect, I see what you're saying about reading up, I do. What I hope to impress upon you is that saying "Read a book" is hardly conducive to a discussion based around creative thinking. Far better is to use that book as a reference point, saying "I've played in this system, which has a section in the rulebook about Stealth. It has you do X and Y, in order for Z to happen." You then continue explaining how that game does stealth until you feel it is sufficient, then you move on to discuss how that material might apply to the discussion. Saying "There is a book. Read it." just shuts off conversation.

I disagree that managing a critical resource to prevent a GAME OVER is necessary. One of the main critiques I have heard from the aforementioned players is that they want to have fun, and something threatening the continuation of that fun ruins the experience. For example, if they spent a long time coming up with a unique character who is fun to play, and some random encounter perma-kills that character with no chance for resurrection. Having a social encounter cause a game over, or having an exploration result in game over, is an unnecessary burden on the entertainment value of the game. It's not a flaw, per se, but I do feel it is not required. As Qralloq's post mentions, Fiasco causes a lot of tension and conflict without the need for fun to stop.

Skill use to improve skills is a good one, and time-tested. But I was more asking for an example of implementation. For example, how much XP should robbing a bank yield? Is it based on stealth? Or on how big the haul was? How much XP do I assign for a character finding important magical secrets in an ancient tome, and does it depend on the contents of the tome?

I just came up with the two axis concept off the top of my head, but what I am suggesting goes beyond binary or partial success systems entirely. Think of it like the "good, fast, cheap work" adage. You can't have all three, so pick two. If one axis represents the cost, and one axis represents the time it will take, then the difficulty and ratio of success can be a reflection of both. If something is cheap and quick, it's probably not difficult, but the results probably won't be of much benefit. Whereas something expensive and time-consuming will probably be greatly beneficial, but might not even be possible to do alone. Instead of being pass/fail, an action is rated on what is required of you in the execution. No more "you fail to do this" or "you succeed." Instead, the results vary based on what you can offer and where it sits on each axis. Let's say Expensive things are not possible without the right funds, or you can do them with reduced funds (at the cost of quality in the result). Time-consuming things are impossible if you want to do them quickly, or you can rush them (at the cost of quality once again). Contrast that to cheap things, which are lacking in variety and usefulness, but you need little or no resources to make them happen. Or Quick things, which hardly take any time at all (but again may not be of much use). You could then go into Proficiency as a show of how fast a person can get something done, and various Resources as a short-cut around costs. A resource might be something like having all the materials already, or having the influence needed to shirk costs.

@Qralloq, I like a lot of what you had to say, but I couldn't think of much to say in response. Sorry.

Check out GUMSHOE from Pelgrane Press, if you haven't. It's a rules system built around investigation procedurals. I know you asked specifically for "concepts" as opposed to specific published games, but GUMSHOE (for all it's failings) makes it's primary directive the effort to address the issue of non-combat centric games treating non-combat like combat-centric games treat combat.

A better way of saying it is this: Call of Cthulhu, the first major investigation game, build it's investigation system off off DnD's combat system. But combat is inherently different from investigation, so the abstraction of "real life combat" into a game mechanic should inherently operate differently from the abstraction of "real life investigation" into a game mechanic. Pelgrane Press handles this by "de-gamifying" GUMSHOE in a big way, and eliminating a lot of the dice rolls you would find in CoC.

This works for me - in my CoC games, I like to roll as few dice as possible anyway. As long as the investigators are asking the right people the right questions at the right times, properly using contradictory evidence as leverage, coming up with smart plans and implementing them carefully, I'm going to reward that to the extent that seems appropriate. Dice rolls come up, of course, but as the years go by, I find myself asking my players to roll their dice less and less.

I suppose it's worth asking - is a game a game if there are no mechanics? At what point does it turn from a game into a literary or performance exercise, and if the players are having fun anyway, does it really matter whether it's a "game" or not? De Profundis is another game (which has recently been brought to my attention) that is entirely focused on letter writing. The action of the story actually happens outside of the "gameplay". There is only one "mechanic", which is a random table mechanic, and even that seems shoehorned in for indie gamers who would be turned off by something so freeform and game-less.

This idea seems like a blast to me, but I know that's a matter of personal taste. Another game that's been mentioned in this thread, which I personally love, is Fiasco, which is more or less completely mechanic-less (though not without rules and structure).

I think that a lot of gamers (myself included) get introduced to tabletop RPGs through combat games like DnD, Warhammer, or even video games like Final Fantasy or w/e (I'm not a video game player, so forgive me if that's the dumbest thing I've ever said). And coming from a gaming background where everything is related to fighting power, strategy, tactics, number crunching, min maxing, etc, it's hard to think about a game existing in less defined terms. But espionage, travel, investigation, crafting, whatever, they're all their own thing. A crafting game will probably need more hearty mechanics than an espionage game, and a romance game might not need hard and fast mechanics at all! Rules, sure. But not necessarily mechanics.

That was really long winded, I apologize.

TL;DR - I personally think you're putting too much stock in quantitative mechanics, and that a mechanics heavy rules system lends itself to and makes sense in regards to a combat focused game more than it would for many, if not most, other genres. Rules-lite games can be fun as hell.

Yes, this! Sorry, I went back and re read the thread and saw that I missed this. Again, using GUMSHOE as an example (and even CoC) - I rarely put my players into "combat" per se. That is to say, rarely do I stop the game and say "okay, roll initiative, this is the turn order, etc etc etc." Once in a while the players will get into a big gunfight and you need to organize that somehow, but usually it's just easier to skip all that since guns will usually incapacitate a human being if they hit, and if you're shooting at something that's not a human being... you most likely should be running instead. So I usually don't even bother with quantitative data in those situations - either it's something you can kill or seriously injure with a single shot, and if you hit them, then you will, or it's something you should be running from, so why bother with "combat" mechanics since you're not going to be able to hurt it and if it gets you, you're probably dead anyway.

sigh...

I appreciate your input, but I seem to have given people the false impression that I started this thread because of a deep personal investment in things being as mechanical as possible. That could not be farther from the truth. I wanted to create a discussion about mechanics other than combat to see what ideas people came up with. Not because games need mechanics or anything like that. Just because I was curious what thoughts people had on how to execute such a thing in a system with rules, rather than playing it free and loose.

Am I to understand that the only games which really "need" mechanics are those based heavily in combat? What am I supposed to get from any of this conversation at all?