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View Full Version : Non-Combat/Roleplay Missions, need help



DontEatRawHagis
2012-11-23, 04:28 AM
I polled my players and the number one request was to make more quests involve less combat.

The past three games were pretty combat heavy. The second to last game had more thinking involved, but still revolved around fighting. The Last game has been mostly fighting. To the point where it feels like we are footsoldiers in the war rather than Heroes.

So I was wondering if anyone has any advice on running Roleplaying sessions and non-combative missions. If not any ideas where I might find some?

Badgerish
2012-11-23, 05:10 AM
RPGs don't need 'combat', but they do need 'conflict'. Combat is the most common source of this in many RPGs because it's easy to understand and it's something you can't (generally) do in real life.

What system are you using? What setting?

An important part of non-combat stuff is a strict timetable/failure conditions, as if you can take as long as you want to achieve something, you will win out in the end.

Repair a sailing ship, then crew it to reach something out in the water (time limited by the tides/currents/the target sailing away)
Repair a temple, and/or rope others into doing so (so friendly cultists can perform a time-limited ritual, e.g. at midnight/dawn)
Transport a desirable cargo across a city (lets say it's a cure for a rampant disease) so it can be distributed properly (then recover it after it's stolen)
Powerful enemies who can be greatly weakened by the actions of NPCs, but the NPCs don't want to assist ("possessing spirits will soon possess you! Let us tie you up in advance so you do no harm!" or "the evil spirit gains power from fear! Don't flee from the portents and omens and celebrate, so the spirit is weak when it appears. We will protect you!")
Take on the role of new/substitute teachers and root out evil at a school (while also teaching classes)


(note: these are all from official LFR adventures for D&D 4ed)

edit: oh, and something from my own game: just give the PCs some downtime.
Say two weeks to spend in a large-town or city without causing too much trouble. Where do you stay? (pointed my PCs to a rented villa, they decorated it!) What do you do for fun? What do you do to earn spending money? Do you look into any training? Do you look into custom(ising) items?
Into this, put some small NPCs with small problems (can't make rent, can't ask out the girl, can't pass the test, can't get over a fear, can't get respect) and see if the PCs give a damn.

Thinker
2012-11-23, 05:47 AM
As Badgerish said, not all conflict is combat. In stories the three types of conflict are Protagonist versus Antagonist, Protagonist versus Nature, and Protagonist versus Self. Everything else is just adding details to these three conflicts.

In Protagonist versus Antagonist you have the players working toward some sort of victory condition that makes it so that the antagonist does not fulfill its own victory condition. The classic example of this can be combat, but any other sort of competition works. You could have a race to reach some sort of MacGuffin first, a chase where the antagonist has stolen something that the players want to keep, a guarding versus attacking scenario, a political campaign, or anything else that pits two parties against each other. A subset of this is Protagonist versus Society, where the group would be fighting for some sort of ideal, such as against slavery or against bullying.

In Protagonist versus Nature the players are against the cruel power of the world. This can be a trek across a wild expanse, where they encounter weather, animals, starvation, climbing mountains, spelunking, falling rocks, and the like. The supernatural would also fit the bill, where the players could be challenged by ghosts, spell effects, etc.

The last type is Protagonist versus Self, which is really about choosing what to do when the situation arises. This requires knowing a lot about your PC's to do properly as you're giving them morally ambiguous choices. The tyrant has conquered the region, but the region is actually better off right now than before he rose to power; should the players try to remove him? Their foe is a powerful golem that has gained sentience and is experiencing the world as if for the first time, but he has killed people in his efforts to escape society and be left alone; he has done evil and might again, but he seems peaceful now. The players are an order of paladins ordered by the rightful king to bring in a band of poachers who have dropped the deer to below sustainable levels, but the poacher's families would starve without them; how should they handle this?

Don't swear off combat as it can be a valuable tool for describing conflict, but just introduce other forms of conflict.

Totally Guy
2012-11-23, 07:55 AM
I polled my players and the number one request was to make more quests involve less combat.

Silly/ If they didn't want combat why were they fighting things? :smalltongue:

I bet it was mind control!

DontEatRawHagis
2012-11-23, 10:11 AM
RPGs don't need 'combat', but they do need 'conflict'. Combat is the most common source of this in many RPGs because it's easy to understand and it's something you can't (generally) do in real life.

What system are you using? What setting?

Tri-Stat, Cyberpunk setting based on the works of William Gibson. eg the Sprawl from Boston to Atlanta.

I had everyone choose between that or zombies. They chose the former. Which gives me a lot of cool new enemies to make.


Silly/ If they didn't want combat why were they fighting things? :smalltongue:

I bet it was mind control!

Three out of the six of us are hardcore combat tacticians. So they find little to do during non-combat sessions. The other three have had enough of pandering to the combat folk and decided that it would be better to branch out more. Still have combat as an option, but not the only one. Our last game was Star Wars and involved actual ground confrontations on a massive scale.

Ulysses WkAmil
2012-11-23, 10:51 AM
Have them try to convince antagonist [x] into stopping their actions. Example: I've got my players convincing a dragon to stop attacking their rebel group. It's simple, but if you give it dire concequences (like being killed) then it becomes a life-or-death diplomatic encounter of intrigue.

king.com
2012-11-24, 08:05 PM
Tri-Stat, Cyberpunk setting based on the works of William Gibson. eg the Sprawl from Boston to Atlanta.

I had everyone choose between that or zombies. They chose the former. Which gives me a lot of cool new enemies to make.


Your running a cyberpunk setting? Thats easy to run non-combat scenarios, your players a sent to investigate a string of murders going on so you need to be looking for clues, interviewing people involved. The areas controlled by gangs/megacorporations/etc, too big to fight head on and so you need to try and gather evidence by sneaking into/finding a way to cooperate with these groups involved to get to the bottom of the problem and name a killer.

Another could be about getting a piece of technology at an auction for a client, turns out the piece you got is a dud and the real ones been stolen so your tracking down the stolen technology, maybe with a time limit (like someone needs it to live or not be killed by whoever they lost it for in the first place) and your navigating the economic world as the thief is trying to sell it on the black market while you need to find the right auction, the right buyer and steal it back.

Couple of ideas I came up with.

Water_Bear
2012-11-24, 08:46 PM
My advice, like all good advice, is obvious to the point of uselessness; to really have strong social encounters the NPCs have to be interesting enough that the PCs will want to talk to them. Come up with some over-the-top personalities and memorable descriptions, then figure out what the NPC wants, then have their desires interact with those of the PCs. If the PCs buy black-market cyberware from a guy wearing sunglasses at night in an alley, they'll have forgotten about him ten minutes later; if their contact is a teenage girl with a mohawk and half of her body replaced with tech who gets shy and stutters around the party face, they'll at the very least remember her name and care if she goes missing.

Another good idea is missions which allow for multiple correct approaches. While getting data about a secret corporate project might sound like a hacker's job, a lot of hacking IRL is social engineering and human intelligence is still incredibly valuable. Plus, even in a digital age, not everything is accessible through outside networks; sneaking or talking your way into the right spot can be a mission all in itself. Basically, give the PCs a goal, set up the opposition, and let them plan it out like a heist movie.

Finally, non-combat doesn't mean no combat. Even if the PCs succeed without encountering security, someone will probably have some idea what happened; something they couldn't have foreseen has led the enemy back to them... or their NPC allies. You would be shocked how protective Players can get of "their" NPCs, even if they only remembered them as "that awesome beard guy" or "loli princess." So as long as the combat isn't the main focus and doesn't take too long it shouldn't be a problem.

NichG
2012-11-26, 08:03 AM
The comment about conflict is spot on. One thing to keep in mind is that there are lots of kinds of conflict, and knowing about those gives you lots of non-combat options. Not all conflict is against an aggressive foe, or even an entity at all. For example:

- 'I need to know something but I do not'. Basically things like trying to find a villain's lair, trying to find a lost treasure, trying to figure out why people are disappearing, trying to figure out what an encoded message means, etc. In these cases, the conflict is not against an active foe but is instead generally against a static puzzle, mystery, etc. The active version of this is when there is someone trying to cover the trail - think murder mysteries and the like.

- 'Exceed limits'. You can think of these as sort of optimization challenges. 'How do we get to the moon within a reasonable time?' 'How do we deliver a letter across the world in 8 hours?' 'How do we lift a 1000 ton boulder?', etc. Basically another static opponent - the parameters of success are defined, and the challenge is figuring out how to use what you have (powers, items, etc) to satisfy those parameters.

Another thing you can do involve 'subtle' conflicts that aren't aggressive by nature. Person A wants to help Person B and Person C resolve their differences, so he can have both of them help with some greater project and not get in eachothers' way. Person D wants to woo Person E, who is at first unaware of them. Things like that.

For a more aggressive sort of scenario, you can pit the PCs against something decentralized that is much larger than them. You have to be a bit careful here - if the problem is 'corrupt regime', PCs will naturally think 'take out the king/dictator/etc'. But if the problem is 'a plague of locusts is threatening hundreds of miles of farmlands' then the PCs have to get creative to solve the problem (and at no time is 'combat' really a useful response). Natural disasters, social movements, things like that are all good fodder for this sort of challenge.

CarpeGuitarrem
2012-11-26, 01:20 PM
Use some sort of mechanics above and beyond the usual. For me, I'd mimic Fallen London's (http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com) approach of tracking abstract states/things via "Qualities". This takes things up a notch from the extremely simple "skill challenge" setup of 4E.

For instance, you could set it up so that there's several qualities which need to be increased to a certain point, or which shouldn't pass a certain point. Succeeding at any given skill check will modify a few of these. For instance, let's say you're trying to find an arcane ritual in a library to cast it...


A "Searching" quality to represent how much of the library you've uncovered
An "Examining" quality to represent how thoroughly you've read your current tome of choice
A "Progress" quality to represent how much progress you've made towards finding the ritual
An "Attention" quality to represent how much attention you've attracted to yourselves
A "Time" counter to represent how much time is left before you have to cast the ritual


From here, you could put together a rudimentary system. When you get Searching up to a certain point, you unlock the "Examining" action (and can continue to increase Searching). The current level of Searching determines how much you may increase Examining with a single action. If Searching is at a low level, each action only increases Examining by a small amount. If it's high, you can really boost Examining.

Pushing Examining to a certain point increases Progress by a single level, and resets Examining. Get Progress to a certain point, and you're able to cast the ritual.

Unfortunately, every action you take reduces Time, and failure increases Attention, which is bad...because the bad guys have spies who are trying to pin down the heroes who are searching up the ritual.

Voila! You now have a small-scale tactical non-combat encounter. You can apply the same philosophy in a lot of ways. "Escaping" could be a quality, so could "Casing" and even "Having mysterious dreams". At certain levels, you can predetermine that qualities will trigger certain events and unlock other courses of action.

Sky's the limit, really.

nedz
2012-11-26, 07:21 PM
As others have said — all Drama requires conflict.

But maybe they want a break from the drama ?


You could go for some exploration, where they find out more about the setting/plot. This doesn't necessarily mean trekking, it could take place in a library.
You could go for a comedy interlude — if you have the skills for it ?
You could make them spectators of someone else's conflict.