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View Full Version : "...in which nobody gets killed." - A different type of adventure



Yora
2013-08-21, 04:57 PM
I just wrote a post about a fantasy comic that really intrigued and also entertained me because it had a plot that was not about stopping the villain from completing his evil plan or fighting the forces of evil, but based entirely about finding out why a lot of people lie about what they know about a child that went missing. (It's called Inverloch and can be read online.)

This made me thinking how often people might actually pull that kind of story off in an RPG. Now in a game like Mouse Guard that doesn't really make a difference between solving a fight or any other kind of obstacle or situation, this is probably not that uncommon. But in a regular, run of the mill "Adventurers Party" game, has anyone played adventures that did not include killing, or at least "battles" in which destroying the enemy was the goal?
I'd really like to hear if anyone has stories about such adventures?

kyoryu
2013-08-21, 07:24 PM
Fate does this type of thing well. Really, any RPG which isn't centered around a tactical combat simulation tends to do this well.

The trick (and this applies to any RPG) is in tension. Tension is all about questions that the players care about. "Will xyz happen?"

If you've got that question, and the players care, they'll try to influence the answer. That's your story.

Getting the players to care about things in your game world is a whole other topic :)

The other question really boils down to how you're resolving scenes, what determines "success or failure", or what the "big question" of the scene is. For most RPGs it's "am I good enough at charop/tactics to overcome this challenge?" For Fate it's "how much do I care about this?" Other games may be different.

Running a no-combat game in a traditional system may be somewhat light in this area, as most RPGs focus very heavily on their tactical combat simulation, and there's not a lot of "game" outside of that.

But in general, you'll want some question to run the scene that the players can engage in. Just "do I randomly roll high enough?" isn't a very interesting central mechanic.

If combat is okay, but you just don't want the central goal to be killing people/directly overcoming them, then just make sure that your fights are *about* something, rather than just being fights. The fights aren't about killing each other, they're about getting the MacGuffin or not. Or saving the NPC. Or anything that's *not* killing the other side. This is also good, because non-TPK goals on both sides make it easier to have failures in your game without the game ending up as TPK. TPK sucks, but escaping at the cost of the villain getting the MacGuffin has interesting long-term consequences that the characters have to deal with.

Totally Guy
2013-08-22, 05:08 AM
I'm playing in a Cortex+drama game at the moment. There's been plenty of dice rolling but only one actual fight.

There has been a few deaths though, my guy has been the one to find every corpse so far!

We are playing space colonists trying to settle a harsh and turbulent planet. There is no big bad, aside from impressions we have of each other. My character does not get on well with the president but is under the thumb of the onboard mafia leader. I'm really interested to see how it's going to play out! Those characters are played by the other players.

Eldan
2013-08-22, 07:45 AM
I've had the odd spy thriller-like story where people could have conceivably killed each other and it would have been in character, but didn't.

I think the problem is that players tend to think in terms of advantage and often very coldly calculating, at least in my experience. It has to be more advantageous not to kill someone. Or at least killing someone should offer no advantage.

I think this works better in a setting where people don't necessarily have personal power. A guild leader, mob boss, CEO, noble or starship captain can be disgraced, exiled or thrown into prison and they aren't really a threat anymore. A sorcerer, demon or dragon as you might meet in fantasy, though? Their power is inherent in their person. They need to go.

I play mostly D&D, so that's where those games happened. Planescape actually makes this more or less possible, sometime: with factions being so important, someone can have immense political power, but very little personal power. Politics in Sigil is, at times, almost like a particularly complicated and crazy sport or game of chess. A few pawns might get removed, but the team captains and spectators just nod sagely, shake hands after the game and prepare for the next one. You lost an intrigue and some faith. But killing the enemy is not your faction's philosophy, so yo umerely prepare for the next intrigue.

It can work in Shadowrun, too, and has a few times. Sure, your players can, if they really like to, carry around the equivalent of a small army in personal weapons. But just as often, they are hired to do something subtle and quiet.

Yora
2013-08-22, 08:20 AM
In the typical generic dungeon crawl, you do not fight people, you fight monsters. Even the orcs and goblins are not people. Their deaths will not cause anyone somewhere else to get upset or do anything in retaliation. In the best case, they are expensive equipment for the villain that needs to be replaced.
And I think based on that, you just follow the track and treat bandits as just the same. They were just a gang of isolated outlaws with no connections to anyone, nobody will miss them or have a problem with their death. And from there, you are very soon at treating angry mobs or guards at the villains castle just the same way.
So you killed half the garrison of the kings castle because his chancelor was a traitor? Oh well, such is life, it was neccessary. Action movies do that all the time. I think there's quite a lot of jokes about all the poor construction workers who build the Death Star at Endor. It may be a neccesary sacrifice for the greater good, but movies never treat it that way. It's always just the faceless mooks who are just as evil as their boss.

But that wouldn't really be the case if you start to think about it just a little bit. All the remaining guards will be pretty pissed and most of villagers also be not too happy. Even the king might regard it as completely out of scale.
I think once that gets mentioned to players, that could change how such situations play out quite substentially.

CarpeGuitarrem
2013-08-22, 09:09 AM
Golden Sky Stories is one of the games that heavily shakes this up, mainly by reframing all of the mechanics so that they don't really touch injury and death. Well, and by framing "success" as "you help the humans become better people".

Zavoniki
2013-08-22, 03:39 PM
I recently ran a game where everyone was house cats trying to survive a Tsunami.

That did admittedly end with quite a bit of fighting(player conflict), but I think there was a good non-combat game there. It was quite fun all things considered.

TroubleBrewing
2013-08-22, 05:57 PM
L5R games tend to go this way at mature tables.

I suppose this is aided by the system being crazy lethal. It's hard to justify slaughtering your way through something when you're just as likely to die as any mook.

Dimers
2013-08-22, 06:30 PM
Had a mini-game in my 3.5 group a half dozens sessions back -- an Arcanists' Championship, where the contestants had to accomplish certain goals using their magic before other contestants did. Stop a huge boulder from running over you, find a needle in a haystack, grab the flag from atop a tower. It worked well as a break from the normal business, and the whole group got interested in how our two mages would approach the problems. Would've been nice to somehow include other party members too, but still, it was definitely an enjoyable session.

We often spend sessions at a time "in town" not killing anything, playing politics, checking up on NPCs we know, selling loot, feeling out plothooks, planning, interacting with temples and so forth. Plenty of it is still related to having killed things or preparing to kill bigger things, because that's what D&D is like.

One entire story arc ended with a series of four combats in the spirit realm that were not killing real creatures at all. It came after a spirit journey that translated into a series of puzzles.

Often our goals are impeded by nasty monsters and/or nasty humanoids -- again, that's D&D all over -- but it's pretty frequently the case that we're after something else entirely. We want to help the martial faction of the dwarves get the crafting tools from the living tower, so we have to forcibly evict the giants who have moved into it. If we had some way to convince them to move or to give us the tools, that's preferable to risking death or risking killing a being with a heart/mind/soul/parent/child. We do battle against an undead mage who has been tormenting a village, but the real challenge is purifying the area.

My most recent 4e combat was a sort of team "king of the hill" scenario. The real goal was getting three of us up to the top platform at the same time. Knocking out enemies just made that easier because they'd stop beating the hell out of us on the way there.

danatblair
2013-08-23, 11:16 AM
I've had some games where the players have semi-official diplomatic roles. while there might be some fighting if a diplomat was conspiring against a ruler, or something like that, it would still mean we might go for a week or two without combat.

combat was the capstone to investigating and politicking. it was not used instead of either.