The Combat-Free Game Experience

[Easy e]

Greetings all,

Curious how many folks on this board have played and participated in an RPG where the game, campaign, adventure; featured no combat at all. The main conflicts came from other formats and were resolved without drawing a weapon and using the combat systems?

I have had some very intense games that have been heavy on politics, intrigue, discovery, exploration, etc. but eventually someone, somewhere drew a weapon and combat mechanics got used.

If you have gone an entire "adventure" or campaign without using the combat mechanics, can you tell me about the experience ?If the combat-free nature of the game was communicated before play began? What were the good and bad of the situation was?

Thanks for your time and input.

[NichG]

So I don't think I've had this happen for an entire campaign in systems that actually have a combat system to speak of in the first place. Multiple sessions in a row certainly, or single-session scenarios. In those cases it was mostly GM or table tastes, not some kind of pre-arranged decision - people were more interested in talking than fighting, so talking happened; the GM was more interested in mysteries or other such things where knowing what you wanted or what would make a difference was more important than being able to use force, so combat became rarer; etc. I personally generally prefer combat to be relatively rare and as optional as possible, so that worked fine for me.

The closest I can think of in full campaign terms would be a Nobilis campaign where there isn't really a combat system (or I suppose it would be better to say, the mechanics are actually constructed in a such a way that they're in-character worse to call upon if you have a violent conflict than just doing stuff non-mechanically, because basically all characters are by default immune to the direct applications of each-others' 'powers'). You can still have a kind of dueling in Nobilis though, but it ends up being more like philosophical rock paper scissors - you do 'ghost miracles' to display things you can imagine doing, and if the other side doesn't come up with a poetic response then they forfeit. Not sure if that counts as combat? I'm not sure I have much to say about the absence of combat in there other than 'its Nobilis, its hard to directly compare with anything anyhow'.

I've certainly played in, and run a lot of things where while there was combat, the actual big turning points and decisions and impacts on the world were not achieved through the combat system but through other things (or short-circuiting the combat system to avoid something that would have been resolved with combat). Some of those situations involved e.g. NPCs fighting NPCs offscreen, but a lot of them are more 'environmental' - actions that change the parameters in which a conflict would have been necessary.

[kyoryu]

I'm pretty sure I've had adventures with no combat, but not a campaign.

I often run Fate, so there's less of a "combat/other" divide than with many systems. But fundamentally, combat and non-combat scenes are the same structure - the PCs want something, they might not get it, how do we figure that out? Combat doesn't use a different system, so it's just whether or not the means of answering that question involve violence or not.

It runs fine and naturally in a situation like that - it's not like combat was off of the table.

I think the real trick is making sure you have interesting stakes for your scenes. Combat just gives you a bit of a crutch in that it inherently gives you stakes of "... or you die", but if you figure out how to have stakes, any scene can be interesting.

Some of the most interesting and tense scenes I've run have had no violence at all, just super tense negotiations with high stakes.

[Thrawn4]

I had some sessions that focussed on social aspects and excluded combat. There just wasn't any need for it and combat might have made it worse.
Usually the plot involved a gathering at court or organizing a huge party. People had to be convinced, bribed, watched or evaded. Sometines there was a way to impress other people by getting creative, like performing on stage, holding a speech, drawing a painting.. finding out about peoples preferences helped a lot, too.
I like to use a hidden checkpoint system: there is a set number of challenges (and some wiggle room if players get creative) and depending on the results there are different endings. That way, players can focus on different things and even fail without stopping the plot.

[Pauly]

I’ve had a couple of CoC campaigns where violence was threatened/imminent but never eventuated. Im base Cthulhu combat is generally a bad idea usually only happens after plan A fails. We also ran a few Cthulu campaigns based on Poirot/the Thin Man/Father Brown style gentleman amateur detectives investigating devious plots rather than eldritch horrors. In the latter case resorting to violence is generally seen as a genre breaking faux pas.

So in Cthulu style investigative games the party is equipped for and capable of violence, but it isn’t inevitable that violence happens.

I ran a Space 1889 campaign based on 80 days around the world. We had a strict end date for the campaign as 2 players were being transferred. In that campaign a few shots were fired at the party and the party fired a few shots at some bad guys who were scampering, but no actual exchange of fire happened. I set up most of the problems to be solved so that they could be solved by negotiation or by skill challenges and that’s what the party did. They avoided combat because they feared delays from recovering from wounds or interference from the local constabulary. I set up a few combat opportunities for them, but they saw combat as an undesirable delay, both in character and out.

[Lacco]

Greetings all,

Curious how many folks on this board have played and participated in an RPG where the game, campaign, adventure; featured no combat at all. The main conflicts came from other formats and were resolved without drawing a weapon and using the combat systems?

I have had some very intense games that have been heavy on politics, intrigue, discovery, exploration, etc. but eventually someone, somewhere drew a weapon and combat mechanics got used.

If you have gone an entire "adventure" or campaign without using the combat mechanics, can you tell me about the experience ?If the combat-free nature of the game was communicated before play began? What were the good and bad of the situation was?

Thanks for your time and input.

I had some sessions, which went without combat. Since at that time I ran a long-lived campaign, with very large amount of background lore, there were parts that ran without combat for whole sessions.

One was a hunt for a page, which contained a missing information on certain PC's family: there were like three sessions where they mostly travelled and searched libraries, haggled with scroll merchants and had a whole monster-less dungeon crawl in an ancient library. It worked mostly because only three players were available at that time, and they all wanted the information for their own reason.

Another one was basically downtime after a big event in campaign (basically a bossfight/final fight with a lot of enemies and then a high-octane chase across a city), where the party felt like they needed some R&R and weren't in on solving anything more than just which tavern to spend their money in and what fancy clothes to buy. Yes, a whole session on shopping, food and sightseeing.

The other successful cases were horror scenarios. Pure exploration combined with a lot of dread.

There was no 'warning' about these: we used Riddle of Steel, which has a pretty awesome but also pretty lethal combat system, so they did not mind a break - especially if this was after a combat-heavy session - but it came naturally. The players themselves mostly distanced themselves from potential combat situations in these specific instances and I did not force their hand.

At one point they even talked down an angry potential combat encounter, just to be able to explore more without fighting.

The worst part was changing my own mindset: I know they liked the combat system and enjoyed it, and I did too, so I kept a handful of potential troublemaker NPCs at hand... and at one point I even forcefully inserted a combat just to have one there, but it felt wrong. So in the other cases, I tried not break the flow of the game and it worked well (including direct feedback).

When they were 'in the mood' for combat, they never shied from it, and enjoyed it, so I knew they were fine with the arrangement for these 'peaceful' instances.

EDIT: Also, my next gaming experiment will be a dungeon delve without combat.

[JusticeZero]

We have plenty of sessions with no combat. They work fine, focus on unveiling mysteries and accomplishing things. I've also seen the party walk up to a trial, take a quick look, and nope out; the time I can think of they were facing down a giant animated tree with a couple of crewmembers defending it; the alchemist stopped, looked at it, asked a few questions, discerned the origin of the particular emplacement, and went back to get some answers from the manufacturer.

[Reversefigure4]

Up to about 20 hours of gameplay in a row without a combat roll is probably our record, but never an entire campaign.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I've certainly had sessions without combat, but I don't think I've ever had more than two of those in a row. That said, I do have a copy of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine on my shelf, and one of these days I'll actually break it out...

[JellyPooga]

I once ran a prelude section of a two-part campaign in which "combat", such as it was, was an automatic fail-state for the PCs. It was a sci-fi horror campaign inspired by the Alien/Aliens films. In the second part, the players were all marines on a bug-hunt; combat a-plenty to go alongside some jump scares and body horror. The first part, however, had the players as non-combatant civilians who, if they squared up to or were caught by the unspeakable horror that was the enemy, just died. No contest. I had several npc's strategically ganked this way to set the tone and expectation, so the game proceeded as the "unstoppable horror vs. sacks of meat" it was intended to be.

By the time the inevitable TPK occured, my players were more than ready for some well deserved pay-back...I'll never forget the smiles on their faces when I told them the kind of characters I wanted them to make for the next session, nor the bigger grins they had when I showed them the arsenal of guns, nukes, sharp sticks and bad attitude they had to choose from!

NB - This was a campaign intended to introduce players to the GURPS system. The civilian characters they played in the 1st part were pre-gens and that part of the campaign focused on dice mechanics, gameplay expectations and world-building/scene setting; combat was explicitly off the table, even though the threat of the game was bodily harm/death. The marines they played in the 2nd part were created by the players (with guidance) and in that section I introduced character gen, development and advancement, as well as combat (includig health, damage, fatigue and healing), tactical play and other more detailed rules (e.g. vehicles, poison, disease, etc.).

[Xihirli]

I’m certainly a low-combat GM, almost every encounter I design can be better solved with roleplay or evasion except one big boss battle at the end.
I did just run a solo game of DnD all about a werewolf PC learning to come to terms with the beast within. That was a good example of my style, there were some fights but the climax didn’t have a single die rolled.

[Satinavian]

Greetings all,
If you have gone an entire "adventure" or campaign without using the combat mechanics, can you tell me about the experience ?If the combat-free nature of the game was communicated before play began? What were the good and bad of the situation was?
Sessions without combat ? regularly.

Adventures (usually 1-4 sessions following a plotarc from beginning to resolution ) without combat ? Also regularly.

Campaigns without combat ? (at least several dozens sessions usually following the whole career of a set of characters) Not yet so far.

As for the adventures, some just have any opportunity for combat. Maybe violence is inappropriate, maybe it just doesn't match the challenges (e.g. survival or murder mystery or whatever)
Some do have opportunity for combat but allow for different approaches as well and the players choose different methods.


I still play fairly classical RPGs, so characters can fight and usually are part of settings where fighting is relevant. And usually throughout a campaign the various themes of subplots get varied. This is why i never had a full campaign without combat.



As for good and bad, i like how combat if often not happening, i really don't need or want it every single time. But i have found that combat takes a lot of time which means having adventures where combat is optional usually means having adventures where the GM can't judge well how long they will take. That is something really to keep in mind when running and planning scedules.


We never actually talked about not having combat in games. THis possibilitiy was always normal for us. Instead i have heard many people complain about official modules of many systems and how there are often combats shoehorned in that little motivation or purpose or how certain authors seem to always want a bossfight as resolution.

[Eldan]

There are, of course, entire games without combat. Detective games, games about children exploring things, heist games, travel games, journaling games...

Yeah, I've had entire campaigns without violence.